Archive for October, 2005

Jérôme Sandarnaud from the french Zope community (aka Zyon),
who was just one of the greatest guy out there, is gone.

We’ll miss you so bad my friend !

(Post originally written by Tarek Ziadé on the old Nuxeo blogs.)

Steve Meaker, from Manitacc, have just achieved and released the CPS English Manual for the upcoming CPS 3.4 release !

I am really amazed by the quality and the amount of work he did. It’s so great to see our lack of english documentation reduce a lot. I (and we) are really happy to see people appreciating our software and doing major contribution like this.

I invite all people interested in CPS or using it to consult this wonderful documentation to understand all CPS features (the manual is here).

Thanks a lot Steve, we are really grateful for this contribution !

(Post originally written by Eric Barroca on the old Nuxeo blogs.)

I see  many questions on the differences between Zope 2 and Zope 3
on mailing lists. Here is a short attempt to answer some of the most common
ones.

Should I use Zope 2 or Zope 3?

Short answer:
If you need a product that runs on Zope 2, like for example CPS, Plone or
Silva, you should use Zope 2. Otherwise you should use Zope3.

Long answer:
Zope2 and Zope 3 has slightly different target audiences. Zope 2 was ment
as a webserver, where you could create dynamically generated websites and
manage them through the web. However, Zope 2 was so powerful and the
combination of true OO database and Python so developer friendly, that many
people soon started to use it as a web application development platform,
creating web applications that had nothing to do with the orginal concept of
creating websites.

Zope 3 is directly and originally … Read more

On newsforge Robin Miller claims that
internet applications is a bad idea. He lists three reasons. 1: loss of
connection, 2: connection outage and 3, connection failure.  OK, so he
really mentions only one reason, but he mentions it three times in different
variations. Yes, internet connections between X and Y is not 100% reliable.
Not only can your hardware or software fail, your connection to the ISP can
fail, the connection between your ISP and the application servers ISP can
fail and the application servers ISP can fail and the application server can
fail and…

Things fail. Connections too. But that is no different from a hardwaree
failure or a software crash from the users point of view. So, the more
important an application is, the more you need to make sure access to it
will work all the time. A rather self-evident point, which Robin Miller
fails … Read more

I have a lot of Python rss/atom feeds in my aggregator and entries are
doubled all over the place.

Could’nt find any tool that would merge entries from several sources out
there, in a smart way, by trying to find doublons.

I wrote a little script, extending Mark Pilgrim’s feedparser we use in
CPSRSS, to merge several sources, using the difflib module and the rss
rendering we have in
CPSBlog.

It calculates the diff ratio on the title and content of each entry to
decide wheter
it’s the same entry. When the ratio is <= 0.2 it’s the same entry
(hopefully :) )

Here’s an example ran on these:

• http://www.planetpython.org/rss20.xml
• http://www.artima.com/buzz/feeds/python.rss
• http://blogs.nuxeo.com/sections/aggregators/all_posts/exportrss
• http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Cookbook/Python/index_rss

The result is here
(It’s a one-shot xmlfile, made today, so it’s not a real feed
 it is still readable by any client though)

Now I’ve been told that this was pretty useless, and that … Read more

If you wonder why it has been so long between 1.0 and 1.3 of the
CalCore/CalZope/CPSSharedCalendar trio, then the answer is not only
vacation, and a whole bunch of big new features, but also that every time I
have been close to releasing a new version, I have first released it to some
of our trusty customers for testing. And they have promptly found bugs,
which I then fixed, and made a new release, and so on.

After the release of 1.0, several additional customers have installed the
new calendar, and we also have people using it outside of CPS altogether. At
this point I dare to say that the new calendar is both prettier, faster and
more stable than the old CPSCalendar. The type of bugs that has been popping
up lately are mostly translation and usability problems, where the calendar
doesn’t behave exactly as you would expect it … Read more

You are in a maze of twisty little config files, all alike

I’m currently preparing to create a non-Zope bundle of CalCore and all it’s
dependencies. Since these dependencies are mostly Zope 3 packages (interface
and schema) it seems natural to use Zope Corps tool for this: zpkg.

Unfortunately zpkg is a complex tool with cryptic documentation. I
have made packages with zpkg before, and it was hard. This time around, it
was equally hard, because I had forgotten everything. I’m sorry to say this,
but when it’s hard to do something, and hard to remember how you did it,
this is a sign of a bad design. Configuring a product to use zpkg is far
from easy or logical, and there are many confusingly similar files, all
named SOMETHING.cfg.

Getting started

First you need to check it out:
  svn co svn://svn.zope.org/repos/main/zpkgtools/tags/zpkg-1.0.0
zpkgtools
or, for the more adventurous:
  … Read more

I went to the
Neckar Sprint last week in Tubingen,
Germany.

A lot of cool things were done/started there for Zope 3:

• Twisted integration
• Http publisher puggable sub-protocol
• Viewlet/portlet framework
• A static version of apidoc
• Some Zope3.org work
• Customizable container views, from the proposal
  here
• XML-RPC introspection integration, from the proposal
  here

I guess I will decorate these points with some links when people that have
worke on each tasks start to publish about it. The
wiki page is definitly the place where all info will be added i
guess.

I have worked on two tasks with Andreas Jung, the puggable publisher and the
introspection stuff.

Http publisher pluggable sub-protocol

The main idea of this task was to change the publisher so anyone who wants
to add a new publication class (to handle json for example) can do it
smoothly by adding some configuration.

You needed to modify the … Read more

OOoCon at Koper was great
Nice meeting, professional level media
coverage (with free tools)
Interressant discussions around Addons and Scripting. This subject was
deeply covered by numerous presentations (
Paolo Montavani,
Ian Laurenson,
Mathias Bauer …).
We see OOo2 is coming : it’s scripting capabilities will boost OOo
development

Following
my presentation, it is now time to work :)

The slides have been transmitted to the organization team and will be soon
available at http://marketing.openoffice.org/ooocon2005/
The video
is also available, showing interressant questions and start of
discussions

I posted a
first mail trying to
start the discussion
You can join
the dev@scripting.openoffice.org
mailing list that will host us before the creation of the new incubator
project
Kazunari Hirano, our great japanese
blogger already relayed this announcement to the japanese
community

As requested, i post my slides here …

And now, lets go building the next OOo development … Read more

Après avoir annoncé son passage à OpenOffice.org en début d’année, la
Gendarmerie Française s’investit dans le scripting.

Ce sont près de 1000
livres qui vont être commandés afin de permettre aux gendarmes
d’exploiter encore plus la puissance d’OpenOffice.org au travers de son
API.

Gageons que celà débouchera vers des contributions au projet OpenOffice.org
en terme d’addons …

(Post originally written by Laurent Godard on the old Nuxeo blogs.)