[Zope-dev] Zope2 and WSGI

[Martin Aspeli]

Hanno Schlichting wrote:
> Hi Tres,
>
> I've seen you started some work on Zope2 and its WSGI publisher. This
> is awesome :)
>
> How does this relate to repoze.zope2?
>
> I'd love to have Zope2 actually support WSGI out-of-the-box. It should
> probably be based on either a simplified repoze.zope2 codebase or
> simply something that gets the job done.
>
> So what's your goal with this and is there any way I can help?

I've got a fair amount of experience deploying repoze.zope2 apps (on 
Zope 2.10/Plone 3.3) and digging around the innards of ZPublisher and 
repoze.zope2. I think it's important that we get to a WSGI option for 
Zope 2.13 or 2.14 (for use in Plone 5), so I'm happy to help if I can.

Hanno and I spoke about this a while ago. One option would be to have 
two options: "WSGI" and "Classic" publisher, where the WSGI publisher is 
only 90% compatible (repoze.zope2 strives for 100%) but 90% more 
maintainable. If you opt into the WSGI publisher, you may need to forgo 
relying on some of the more insane parts of the publisher (such as weird 
things in the request), but you get a more maintainable, better tested 
and better documented alternative. The old publisher basically stays 
as-is. We can then fix Zope and Plone to use only the "sane" parts 
(relatively easy, I think) and let Plone opt into the WSGI publisher.

Another thought is to maybe try to make Zope's request compatible with 
WebOb, which would make it useful for lots of middleware, though that's 
possibly a bit more radical.

Martin

-- 
Author of `Professional Plone Development`, a book for developers who
want to work with Plone. See http://martinaspeli.net/plone-book