[Zope] publishing question

Paul Everitt Paul@digicool.com
Fri, 23 Apr 1999 06:35:34 -0400


Jeff wrote:
> Do ZServer and Emacs play nicely together, nowadays? I 
> remember reading
> something on the list a while back regarding some problems with this
> setup. Also, does Emacs' HTML mode handle DTML well?

Long discourse here.  Warning: I'm not a talented Zope developer, not a
talented developer of any kind, and not a horribly sophisticated
Emacs/XEmacs user.

I love Emacs.  I'm using XEmacs a lot these days, but I'll just say
Emacs.  I've badgered Amos for two months now about getting EFS support
working -- for me, Nirvana would be editing Zope directly from Emacs.

Why is it so cool?  Let me describe how it works first for those that
don't know Emacs or ange-ftp/EFS.

Yesterday I ran ZServer from my sandbox and fired it up with HTTP on
port 9211 and FTP on port 9210.  I then went into XEmacs and asked it to
open the "directory":

/someuser@somemachine#9210:/PaulStuff/

provided my login information stored in an acl_users folder and blam,
there was a "directory listing" of all my stuff.  I visited a test.html
file, it loaded into a buffer and HTML mode turned on, colorizing my
tags.  I made a change and saved the "file".  I then went into Netscape,
pressed refresh on test.html and saw my changes.

Beyond that it gets cool.  You can mark twenty things on your hard drive
and load them into Zope or vice versa.  Presumably you could copy things
from one Zope to another.  You can use the excellent diff tools to see
changes between a local version and a remote version or apply a patch
sent to you by someone.

If you make a mistake you can go into Zope and undo the changes.

Ultimately there are some deep flaws with this.  First, it's still FTP
under there.  FTP is security challenged, but more than that, it isn't
an object system.  How, via FTP, would you add a property to a folder?
Change the security?  Indicate a DTML syntax exception?  Review the
posts in a discussion folder?  FTP is not part of the "web object
model".

There are some other "gotchas" as well.  The current DTML syntax does
not lend itself to playing nice with HTML editing modes in FTP clients
such as Emacs, Dreamweaver, etc.  

Anyway, that's some of my thoughts on the subject.

--Paul