[Zope3-dev] Publisher test harness for new protocol development

[Jeff Kowalczyk]

[Stephan] (Zope as a Universal Network Conduit) is my dream too. Please,
please, please help writing servers for Zope 3. If you like, I can
create a branch tonight, so you can look at some of the new development
in VFS and FTP stuff.

[Jeff] If the server framework
http://cvs.zope.org/Zope3/lib/python/Zope/Publisher/ is the replacement
for Medusa in Zope3, there probably needs to be some entry-point for
people who are interested in working on a protocol, but are unfamiliar
of all the details needed to interact with Zope3 at its present
development stage. Something that makes experimenting with your new
framework as approachable as
http://www.nightmare.com/medusa/programming.html would be immensely
helpful.

But in lieu of documentation, which might be premature at this point,
could one of you who are very familiar with the new framework create a
protocol development test harness for it? This could be a combination of
a few debugging support classes for running Publisher separately from
Zope3, and some very explicit, non-zope-specific instructions for
getting a telnet (or logged) view of a new MyProtocol.py conversation up
and running on Windows and Linux platforms. 

If it is possible, it would probably make the process easiest if the end
point of a protocol's handler when run in the test harness was just a
reflection string of the method and parameters that would call into
Zope3 objects if run normally. The protocol developer could override
response methods to continue a conversation with a client that expected
folder names, for example. You'd be able to observe what a given client
program would call on Zope in a given situation, to compare it with the
relevant RFC document.

It would lower the entry barriers for people new to protocol programming
and/or Zope(3) core development. We'll get support for more protocols
out of it. If Zope3 is going to encourage support for many protocols on
a new and as-yet undocumented framework, a self-contained protocol
conversation and debugging technique maintained as part of the /test
suite will be something everyone will benefit from long after the
initial Zope3 release.