[Zope-dev] Re. Scheduler product, anyone?

Loren Stafford lstafford@icompression.com
Fri, 4 Feb 2000 12:33:17 -0800


Thanks Jerry. Yes, just getting cron to run a Zope method is easy.

I'm thinking in terms of a Zope ISP. Individual users generally do not have
the privilege or telnet access to create crontabs and the ISP's support
department doesn't want to have to do it for the users. So I (a user not an
ISP) am interested in creating a means so that the ISP would only have to
set up one crontab for each customer and would never have to change it
(except maybe for the frequency, and perhaps there's a way to parameterize
that). The crontab would run a Zope Dispatcher which would then dispatch
Zope methods that had been scheduled from within Zope. Thus, Zope would
acquire cronish capabilities.

Because I'm also thinking about repetitive tasks, I'm not anxious to have to
capture the outputs of the scheduled methods. I'd have to add them to the
end of a log file, and have to worry about what happens when more than one
copy of the method is running. I thought I'd expect scheduled methods to
have side-effects, but no STDOUT output, and throw away any output that
might be created. Do you think it's important to capture output?

The kinds of scheduled tasks I'm thinking about are
 - email reminders
 - garbage collection
 - updating syndicated content from other sites

Anybody have other examples with other use patterns?

-- Loren

> -----Original Message-----
> From: zope-dev-admin@zope.org [mailto:zope-dev-admin@zope.org]On Behalf
> Of Jerry.Spicklemire@IFLYATA.COM
> Sent: Friday, February 04, 2000 11:28
> To: zope-dev@zope.org
> Subject: [Zope-dev] Re. Scheduler product, anyone?
>
>
> I had to do this just yesterday, and the urllib.py module made it
> absolutely
> painless. Here's the simplistic little script I came up with,
> which could be
> called by cron, or some other task manager. This ia probably way less cool
> than
> the answer you're looking for, but it might give someone else
> some ideas . .
>  .
>
> Later,
> Jerry S.
> ---------------------------------------------------
>
> """
> 	urlgrabr.py is a simple script to hit an URL,
> 	capture the generated output,
> 	and manipulate it,
> 	based on parameters.
>
> 	e.g. save it as a file,
>
> 		python urlgrabr.py http://server/folder/object
> file=filename.html
>
>
> 	Default is simply to request the URL, and exit, dumping all data.
> """
>
> import urllib
> import sys
> import string
>
> c_url	=  sys.argv[1]
>
> c_action = None
>
> u_url = urllib.urlopen(c_url)
>
> if len(sys.argv) > 2	:
>
>     	c_action = sys.argv[2]
>
>     	if string.lower(c_action[:5]) == "file="	:
>
>     		f_action = open(c_action[5:], "w")	#	file name
> 		for l in u_url.readlines()	:
> 			if string.strip(l[:-1])	:
> 				f_action.write(l)
> 		f_action.close()
>
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