Date: Tue, 07 Nov 2000 23:56:28 -0500
From: emf mindlace@digicool.com
To: editors@linuxtoday.com
Subject: November 8th Zope Weekly News
Structured Documents, Wikis for Now, Documentation process, more
Write Locking, HiperDOM, Quick Management fixes, *Zope: The
Definitive Guide*, count the Zopatistas, and clustering
Zope.org
The opinions expressed in Zope Weekly news are solely the
authors’, and not the opinions of Digital Creations, The Zope
Community at-large, or the Spanish Inquisition.
If you or your company are doing something cool with zope,
“submit it to the Zope Weekly News”, zope-web@zope.org for possible
inclusion.
And Now For Something Completely Different:
—
Zope Status
by Brian Lloyd
Summary
Getting ready for 2.2.3
Recent News
Last week saw a number of new proposals in the Fishbowl at
dev.zope.org. Fred Drake, a newly acquired member of the DC team
added a proposal for Structured Documents that can interoperate
with a wide range of tools and render themselves in a “variety of
formats”,
http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Proposals/StructuredDocument
Ken Manheimer started the “Wiki for now”, http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Proposals/WikiForNow
proposal, aimed at resolving some of the immediate shortcomings of
the current Wiki product regarding its use for dev.zope.org. The
idea here is to spend a short amount of time fixing the most
painful problems that impede progress in the Fishbowl.
Documentation is currently a weak area for Zope. Ironically, the
problem really isn’t a lack of content, its a lack of organization
among those who produce useful documentation. The current
documentation “process” is not well-defined, so Amos and Michel
have started a Fishbowl project to develop and formalize the
process of producing Zope documentation. The end result of this
will be a well-known and “discoverable process”,
http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Projects/DocumentationProcess/FrontPage
that will allow the community to take better advantage of the
documentation energy out there:
Locking project”,
http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Projects/WriteLocking/FrontPage
to support DAV-aware Web tools that require DAV locking support on
the server:
HiperLogica and Martijn Pieters are working on fleshing out the
HiperDom project and moving various bits of HiperDom info into the
Fishbowl. Zopistas interested in this project to add XMLC-like
templating to Zope should visit the new HiperDom development home
and get their “licks in now”, http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Projects/HiperDom/FrontPage
while the requirements are being formalized.
Also, Adam Davis has sent a final request for comment on his
proposal for several “quick fixes”,
http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Proposals/ManagementInterfaceQuickFix
that we could make to the Zope management interface to improve
productivity in the 2.3 release timeframe.
Near Future
I had hoped to get 2.2.3 out this week, but there are still a
few loose ends to tie up. I hope to (finally) get the fix for the
infamous “__call__” bug included among other things.
We have started some work behind the scenes to apply better
organization to dev.zope.org to make it easier to find what you are
looking for and to get “at a glance” status for various projects
and proposals. Some of this will be bound up with the “Wiki for
now” project, but there will be at least some organizational
progress before that project is finished.
—
Documentation
by Michel Pelletier
Amos and I spend much of last week *not* working on the book
(yeah, we couldn’t believe it either). Although we did handle the
usual dozen or so comments, suggestions, and revisions sent to us
by you wonderful community people about the book, most of our time
was spent writing up a proposal and prototype for the Brand
Spankin’ New Digital Creations Documentation Process. What is that,
you ask?
As it stands Digital Creations has no process for authoring,
editing, delivering, or maintaining, documentation. This,
obviously, creates lots of problems. How many resources to we throw
at documentation? How is it done? Who edits it, and when? Where can
it be found? Who is it intended for?
Over the past year, Amos and I have worked up a specific
*instance* of a documentation process for developing a Zope book.
After some consideration, and meta-thought, we have put together a
proposal and prototype documentation process. For the OO-illuminati
among you, you can think of this as a *class* that defines a
generic process which will be used in certain instances to create
documentation artifacts (for example, we used it to create the
*Zope Book*).
But obviously Amos and I have experience writing only one
artifact, so we need your help to make this process a real thing
that will really help. So “check it out”,
http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Projects/DocumentationProcess/FrontPage
over at “dev.zope.org”, http://dev.zope.org/ and tell us what
you think.
Many thanks, and on that note, what ZWN would be complete
without me plugging “the Zope Book”:http://www.zope.org/Members/michel/ZB/ at least
once? But I do have some real news, it looks like O’Reilly has
decided that the book title will be *Zope: The Definitive Guide*,
which is a bit of a misnomer because it *isn’t* definitive, it’s
didactic. But the marketroids hath spoke, and so it shall be. Till
next week.
—
Zope Web
— by Ethan Fremen
How Many Zopatistas?
Zope gets downloaded from zope.org 12-15,000 times a month. It
has risen steadily over the last year and a half. Zope has been
downloaded roughly 200,000 times since version 2.0.
Zope is distributed on all major linux distributions, but
there’s no way of tracking those.
Netcraft asserts that there are 937 servers “reporting
themselves as zope”,
http://www.netcraft.com/survey/Reports/0010/byserver/Zope/index.html
Note that this only works for proxy-passed or naked zopes, not
pc/fast-cgi’d sites. For example, CodeIt shows up as Apache.
Another reason to encourage the practice of proxy-passing 🙂 I
think it may be safe to assume that at most, 1/2 of live zope sites
use proxy passing.
There are 1617 members of zope@zope.org and 409 members of
zope-dev. There are 200,000 unique visits to zope.org every month
(ok, that’s a record :).
Therefore, I believe there are at least 2000 zope sites and
10,000 – 20,000 people who have used zope at least once, though
they may not admit it if they’re running for election.
Zope Heads East for Winter
Zope is finally going to be moving to a three-system cluster!
When you’ve got a completely dynamic website with over 10,000 pages
of content, 256mb ram just doesn’t cut it any more.
We’ve got a nice system up with the folks at baymountain.com,
which includes one Storage Server and two ZEO Client servers, in
the addition to a load balancer. This way, no spider should get in
our way, and as our usage grows, we’ll just be able to add more
commodity boxen as ZEO clients to handle the load!
You can go visit our tenuous “migration plan”, http://www.zope.org/Wikis/zope-web/MigrationPlan
as long as you promise to remember that the best laid plans of mice
and men oft gang agley.
Vote!
Here’s something for all you international folks who’re sick and
tired of United States elections, and something more important for
those of you who’ve made the choice between Gush or Bore: Renaming
Python Methods.
Python Methods have a poor name, because you can have a python
method that lives on the filesystem. Furthermore, we’re going to
have Perl methods soon, and maybe tcl methods and java methods and
Assembly methods… ok, probably not assembly methods.
Anyway, take the poll, and help decide what- if anything-
methodish objects in zope should be called.
Documentation Overview
Rik Hoekstra has submitted a rough draft of the Documentation
Overview: Take a “look at it”, http://www.zope.org/Documentation/ORganization/Use
and “send in your comments”, zope-web@zope.org
-EOT-