[ZWeb] Zope.net thoughts...

Joshua Prismon josh@technicaldetails.org
Thu, 16 Jan 2003 14:03:11 -0700


This is a little OT, but just some quick thoughts...

I have followed all of the comments here with particular interest. I
thought that I would add a few interesting comments. I played with Zope
way back when, and then recently gave Zope and Plone a try for my site
(www.technicaldetails.org). 

In addition, I also code with J2ee and with .NET

Since Zope was developed, two strong trends have emerged:

- Semantic information (via RSS)
- Web Services and interoperability (via SOAP and XML-RPC). 

I think it is important that NZO take advantage of both of these
systems. 


= Semantic Information (ideas only)

- Why re-invent the wheel? ZopeZen and several other community sites are
doing a good job covering Zope News. In addition, Zoper's have a lot of
things other then just politics to cover. Yet the RSS and syndication
abilities of Zope are _so_ limited that I run a completely different
site (www.prismon.com) on Movable Type to do collaboration and
weblogging. A central site that supports a XML-RPC bloging system would
be a great way to tie the community together. 

- Someone on ZopeZen raised the possibility of doing a single login to
sites like CMF.zope.org, Zopezen, CZO and plone?? Some sort of system
that ties together the Zope resources out there would probably be most
welcome. A XML-RPC users folder?

This leads to personalization. What RHN (RedHatNetwork) and others are
doing right now is phenomenal from a systems admin point of view. I
would love to see a system that keeps track of things that you are
interested in (ala GotDotNet), can automagically do some sort of
distributed patching and syndicate information (he ZC, this is something
you could charge for).

Right now, if I want to keep track of my system components, I have to
hit Zope.Org, ZopeZen, CMF.zope.org, www.plone.org,
sourceforge.net/projects/collective. 

= Integration
Right now, I can do amazon and google searches, blogs, and book
references off of allconsuming.net via SOAP. More and more services are
beginning to expose SOAP interfaces to the outside world. J2EE 1.4 and
.NET also support SOAP and WSDL out of the box. If we want Zope to be a
"premier app server" we need to think about how to integrate these in
and expose Zope services to the outside world. For example, I wrote
myself a quick app in C# to keep track of my weight and lifting
schedule. I would love to have that thing be able to hit a exposed
interface and add information to the Zope site automatically. When we
can do that, we will be able to get into more projects simpler (how many
ways can outside information get into a Zope database? DB's are about
the only way, and they are kinda ugly right now).