Twisted Sprint

A Twisted sprint will be held in Hobart on 1-3 April 2005.  The sprint involves no attendance fees, another example of good things done without a lot of formal structure or expense. Good luck to all involved.

UK Zope Developer Chris Withers to visit Australia

I first heard of Chris Withers when I put Squishdot on my hosted webspace back in 2001 and noticed Chris was listed as one of the developers. Squishdot helped me see the power and potential of Zope. Chris is still working with Zope and is visiting Melbourne and Sydney in August.  He will be coming to our OzZope meeting on Tuesday 2nd August.  Chris will be in Sydney from 10th to 16th August and would like to meet up with developers.

Tuesday 26th April OzZope Meeting - Melbourne

It's been a couple of months since our last meeting, a number of people have said it's about time we met again...so we are :)
We going to try a new venue a small hotel with an upstairs function room.  They have reasonably priced food.
7pm  Meet and eat
8pm  Talk and demo  - Zope based XML tree extensions by Jim Gilbert from Vivitec, followed by general  round table discussion. I'll bring the two new Zope 3 books and a couple of Plone books.
Location:  Mi Casa 213 Franklin St. Melbourne.  This is at the roundabout behind Queen Victoria Market.  Plenty of parking and close to trams.

Tuesday 24th May OzZope Meeting - Melbourne

7pm Meet and eat
8pm  Talk and demo - Workflow Graphic Tool, John Barratt from Vivitec
Location:  Mi Casa 213 Franklin St. Melbourne.  This is at the roundabout behind Queen Victoria Market.  Plenty of parking and close to trams.

Web Component Development with Zope 3

  "Web Component Development with Zope 3" by Philipp von Weitershausen, is officially out now.
    The book covers every aspect of X3.0, the latest Zope 3 release. All chapters are accompanied by a common example application. Prior Zope 2 knowledge is not necessary, though useful. The book also provides a full ZCML and zapi reference in the appendix. More information about the book, such as a sampler chapter or locations to buy, can be found at the book's official website, http://worldcookery.com.

    Behind the scenes members of the Zope community from around the world helped editing, reviewing and testing the examples the book.  As one of the book's reviewers seeing each chapter emerge and evolve was fun.  It was a joy to work with such a focused well organised author. ~ Jan Smith

Here's a reprint of an interview by Tarek Ziade from the French Zope solution provider Nuxeo with the author of Web Component Development with Zope 3 -  Philipp von Weitershausen.

1. Can you introduce yourself?
My name is Philipp von Weitershausen. I was born in Bonn, Germany and grew up in the Rhine area. Before graduating from high school in Berlin I spent a year going to an American Highschool near Boston, Massachusetts. I now live in Dresden, Germany where I study Physics at the University of Technology.
I have been interested in computers since I was a teenager, started using Linux around kernel 2.0.18. The early PHP got me interested in web applications and I managed to work as a PHP programmer in the afternoons after school. Later, I discovered Zope and through it came to Python. Since then I have never touched anything else that isn't Python. Most of my Python applications are Zope applications, though. Since 2001 I've been a self-employed software developer and consultant.
My interests besides Physics and computers include outdoor sports in the mountains (skiing, hiking, mountain biking), basketball, playing the saxophone and travelling.

2. What are the things you are doing with Zope 3?
I'm one of the few people among the Zope 3 core developers that do not use Zope 3 in a current project yet. Unless, of course, you consider this book a "project" (which I do, since it took a considerable amount of time to "implement").
There are a few things that I wish to do with Zope 3 though. I am very keen to follow and participate in a new content management framework on top of Zope 3 (sort of like the CMF was for Zope 2), for example. This topic alone could once be worth a whole book by itself...

3. I'm launching a new project, should I use Zope 3 yet?
Short answer: Of course!
Long answer: Zope X3.0 is out there. It's stable, it's used in production, it can be used by you today! Don't be scared by the X. It originally suggested something like eXperimental which in no way means that X3.0 is experimental software. Thanks to heavy automatic testing, X3.0 is from a quality assurance point of view probably better tested than Zope 2 ever will be. Nowadays, you can see the X as a reminder that Zope X3.0 is not just a new version of Zope 2, but actually a completely redesigned product that was rewritten from scratch.
There will be cases where you don't want to use Zope 3 just yet. For example, Zope 3 is still lacking some elements that content management applications invariably need (such as better cataloguing support, reference management, workflow). The existing Zope2/CMF-based CM systems have an enormous code base here that is not available to the Zope 3 platform yet.
Fortunately, when you decide to use one of these Zope2-based systems now, you can already start using Zope 3 technology within your Zope 2 application thanks to the Five product [http://codespeak.net/z3/five]. By using Five you not only get the best of both worlds, but you also ensure that your application is much more easily portable to Zope 3 when the time comes. Same goes for new features that are implemented in Plone, CPS, and Silva today.
So, if you can't or don't want to use Zope 3 today, you can walk the path of an easy migration by using Five. Either way, it makes sense to use the concepts and technology of Zope 3 today.

4. Who should read this book?
All those who want to get their hands on Zope 3 but don't know too much about it yet. Zope 3 introduces a number of brand new concepts to the Zope world that most people are not familiar with yet. I have tried to make an extra effort explaining these thoroughly and giving real-world examples. In fact, the development of the example application plays a key role throughout the whole book.
Apart from the new concepts, Zope 3 is also heavily influenced by the CMF and, of course, Zope 2. Zope 3 reflects the lessons we have learned over the years with those two platforms. Whenever appropriate, I try to contrast a certain Zope 3 feature with the way it is done in CMF or plain Zope 2. I wanted to give my readers the opportunity to understand why exactly Zope 3 wants to do it that way and not the way we used to do it.
As a reader of my book you should know Python and be familiar with the core web technologies like HTTP, (X)HTML, XML, etc. Prior knowledge in Zope is not necessary, but as I pointed out above, sometimes helpful. Since Zope 3 is much closer to Python (sometimes we say it's more "pythonic"), this book should also be interesting for Python developers that are getting into Zope for the first time.

5. Any new writing planned yet?
No, not so soon :) . At least not in the form of a book; I might write some more articles on Zope 3 as I've done already (e.g. German LinuxMagazin).
Then again, the Zope 3 development trunk is bringing a lot of great improvements and thus a lot of changes that will sooner or later ask for an update of the book. I don't want to talk about further editions before the first one is even out yet, but I hope there will always be a need for Zope documentation and therefore a reason to keep documentation projects like this book alive.

Get more info about the book here : http://worldcookery.com

Jan Smith
Coordinator OzZope
www.ozzope.org