[Zope] Sixth ZOPE 3 Newsletter

[Gary Poster]

WELCOME TO THE ZOPE 3 NEWSLETTER: ISSUE 6 (16 JAN 2003)

   Welcome to the sixth Zope 3 newsletter.  Information about Zope 3 and
   newsletter contributions and suggestions can be found at the bottom of
   this newsletter.

GLOSSARY FOR THE UNINITIATED

   Encounter a term in this newsletter you don't know?  Try this
   glossary:  http://dev.zope.org/Zope3/NewsletterGlossary

NEWS SNIPPETS:

  - Hopefully you noticed the first Zope 3 alpha release on December 31,
    2002!  Congratulations to the people who worked long and hard hours
    to make it happen.  http://dev.zope.org/Zope3/Downloads

  - Tres Seaver implemented the core behavior for some of the
    relationship types discussed in
    http://dev.zope.org/Zope3/RelationshipService
    These will hopefully find their way into the Zope 3 CVS soonish. :-)

  - Jim Fulton wrote a "science fiction" proposal of how through-the-web
    site development is planned to work.  It brought forth a flood of
    responses on the Zope 3 list; for one thing, as far as I can tell,
    if you use ZClasses, we want to pick your brain. :-)  See
    http://dev.zope.org/Zope3/ThroughTheWebSiteDevelopment
    and then if you are really intrigued start slogging through the
    mailing list archives (you have your work cut out for you!)
    http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope3-dev/2003-January/004921.html

STEPHAN RICHTER: Locale Support and On-line Help

   Locale Support

     Over Christmas I finished the implementation of the Locale
     Support Proposal:
     http://dev.zope.org/Zope3/I18nFormatLocaleSupport

     While it was overshadowed by some license problems (that are now
     resolved) and  some grief with time.strptime() on Windows, the
     zope.i18n.locales is a  powerful package to localize everything
     around number and datetime objects.  Since I utilized the ICU
     project's XML-based locale information, we have now  full support
     of all locales that ICU supports!

     At the heart of the locale support lies the zope.i18n.format
     module, which can  be used independently of the locales package.
     It can read number and  date/time format patterns. It then uses
     these binary patterns to parse for  example date/time strings
     into datetime objects or convert datetime objects  to strings.

     All of the code is accompanied by over 450 tests. Some of the
     ToDo-items  include documentation, integration into ZPT and the
     Translation Service, and  maybe restructuring the Translation
     Service to use Locales instead of Message  Catalogs.

   On-line Help

     I also implemented http://dev.zope.org/Zope3/OnlineHelp

     The On-line Help is supposed to be incredibly similar to Zope 2's
     Help. Since  currently we do not have STX or ReST implemented in
     Zope 3, I was able to  implement the proposal only for plain text
     files. You can access the On-line  help from everywhere adding
     ++help++ to the URL, like in  http://localhost:8080/++help++

     Furthermore, if you want to see the OnlineHelp in action, you
     should create a  File and click on Upload; look at the right
     column of the screen and you will  see an 'online help' box.

     We urgently need people to write documentation for the
     on-line help, documenting  the various screens and functionality!

JAN SMITH and GUS GOLLING: Calling all designers!!

   Zope 3 development is not for experienced python coders only.
   People with graphic skills, user interface layout skills and tutorial
   skills are also strongly needed.

   In preparation for graphic and user interface design work to be done
   as part of the upcoming Australian Zope 3 Sprint (Melbourne, date
   TBA), members of OzZope, the Australian Zope Interest Group, have
   chatted with members of the Zope 3 Dev team on IRC.

   Gus Golling and I decided to volunteer.  We have been helping with
   some graphics for the UI, and also have started a  Design Style Guide.
   The guide gathers suggestions and images about the possible directions
   for the 'style' of the Zope 3 User Interface, beyond the exciting
   developments resulting from the Rotterdam Sprint work.  Areas under
   discussion are the Zope 3 logo, Zope 3 object icons, buttons, skin
   switcher (in conjunction with Zope 3 dev team work), typographic
   style guide and color schemes.
   http://www.ozzope.org/OzSprintWiki/StyleGuideZope3

   We have also had a couple of collaborative international efforts on
   IRC - they have been fun and productive.

   Please send an email to zope3-dev@zope.org if you would like to help
   out too!

R. DAVID MURRAY: Authentication Service optimization and polish

   Based on Jim's instructions, I rewrote the the auth service
   (zope/app/services/auth.py) to speed up user lookup by dropping the
   BTreeContainer mixin, switching to using two BTrees for the data
   (principal id and username), and implementing the rest of IContainer
   directly on the auth class.  I then altered IPrincipal to include
   a getRoles attribute, implemented it on the PrincipalBase class,
   and altered the zopepolicy security policy to grab the Authentication
   service and use the getRoles method of the principal to compute
   the base roles instead of using only anonymous, as it did before.

STEVE ALEXANDER: Coding and Helping

Here's what I can remember of what I've been up to
recently:

  * Various things for the Zope 3 alpha, including work on the event
    service with Gary Poster, and renaming the ObjectHub service to the
    HubIds service, upon discussion with Gary and Casey Duncan.

  * At Alexander Limi's request, converted the form generation code to
    use div elements rather than table rows::

     <div class="row">
       <div class="label">Form label</div>
       <div class="field"><input ..... ></div>
     </div>

    This will make CSS-based layout much easier.

  * Helped Albert from Codeworks with his work on exposing named adapters
    in the local adapters service, and making the local utilities service
    (still a work in progress). Albert has done most of the work on
    these, though.

  * Still working on the query service.

  * With Albert from Codeworks, preparing further work on the schemagen
    project. This is the work that Martijn Faassen and I started at the
    sprint in Vilnius and can be summarised as "zclasses done right for
    zope 3".

CONTRIBUTING

   Please send Zope 3 news, and newsletter suggestions and requests, to
   zope-news@zope.org, with "Zope 3" somewhere in the subject line.
   As you can see, casual and quick news items are acceptable and even
   desirable.

MORE INFORMATION ON ZOPE 3

   The central place to find Zope 3 information is currently
   http://dev.zope.org/Zope3

   The Zope 3 mailing list is archived and managed at
   http://lists.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope3-dev

   The Zope 3 development IRC channel, #zope3-dev at irc.openprojects.net
   is (strictly) for discussion of Zope 3 development issues.

   Newsletters are archived at http://dev.zope.org/Zope3/Zope3Newsletter