[Zope] FYI: Running Zope off a CD-ROM

[Paul Everitt]

Howdy folks.  I thought I'd share the results of something we delivered
yesterday and see if anyone here thinks it's useful.

We are pursuing a contract for a think tank that wants to provide an
interactive presentation of a data-driven policy decision.  The
deliverable must run completely off a CD-ROM without installation of
anything and use a standard web browser with no tricks.

First we whipped up a quick Zope site that had a few cosmetic pieces in
it.  For a demonstration application we took 1600 recent Zope mail
messages, made a ZClass for them, then loaded them into Zope and
catalogued them.

Next we took the "read-only" machinery that _might_ be in Z2b4 (it's in
my sandbox), that allows ZServer to run without writing a pid file or
log file, and ZODB to run in-memory.  You're still allowed to do
everything with the database -- add objects, undo, versions, etc. -- but
no changes are made on disk.  When you quit, the changes are gone.  Very
useful for giving demos as well.

Finally I copied the directory onto a CD-R.  Sure enough, you just
double-click on start.bat (I don't know anything about autorun) and,
after a bit of a wait, everything runs just fine.  Absolutely nothing
gets written to the hard drive.

It's still a little rough.  First, there's a whole lot of unnecessary
stuff being imported (like all the win32 stuff for running as a
service), and thus the startup time is around 45 seconds.  With some
serious tinkering I imagine that could be brought under control.

But still it's a neat opportunity for Zope.  Where else can the app
server _and_ database be cranked up with one click and leave your system
in a nice state?  Try that with ColdFusion or Domino. :^)

If anyone thinks this would make a good "How-To", either for the part
about running in read-only mode or the mail archive application, lemme
know.

--Paul