Richard Jones' Log

A friend just asked me "is there any transparent CORBAlike product for python?" Now, I know there is, but I couldn't recall details. So I poked at the PyPI browse interface... "Software Development" ... "Object Brokering" and there's the list of tools.

Neat.

I still need to think of a way to address the issue of people not hiding releases... Maybe I should alter the code so it auto-hides un-hidden releases when you add a new one. The single-visible-release use-case is probably the more common one...

A gentle introduction to the roundup API.Cool :)

I've recently run the roundup package through epydoc (having cleaned up the docstrings and defined __docformat__='restructuredtext') and it's pretty good. I've updated the API docs on the website with the results...

Zope 2.7.0 is finally out! Here's what's new:

Configuration

The new configuration system, modelled on the apache config file, replaces the old mess of environment variables, command-line switches and editing of the command-line script with a config file. A lot of additional configuration housecleaning was performed.

Installation is now easier

The software is now installed using standard mechanisms (no more obscure "python wo_pcgi.py"!), and doesn't run in the downloaded directory. Installing individual Zope instances is done using mkzopeinstance. Installing ZEO is also now easy, with mkzeoinstance.

Runtime

The old Zope combined runtime/manager has been replaced by a more clean separated daemon and manager (using zopectl). The Windows installer contains NT/2K/XP service support on a per-instance-home basis.

Other stuff

Added (my ;) reStructuredText document content type. Ordered folder support is now built in. Control Panel improvements (manage mounted databases and see all medusa servers).

General maintenance

There's been a lot of bug fixes. More importantly, there was a security audit which closed a number of potential holes

All in all, a fine release.

A bunch of us OzZopers (and some ring-ins) just finished another Sprint for Zope3. Anthony, Brad and I spent our time trying to a) figure out what the site management interface was trying to do, and then b) making it more obvious to a new user what the site management interface was trying to do. This was a good topic for me, as I'm feeling a little burned out by our recent heavy development period at work, and I got to just tweak some stuff in Zope3 that really, desperately needed tweaking.

In the end, Zope3 is still a big, confusing system, but I think we made it suck less :)

Melbourne has retained its position as the best city in the world to call home. But we who live here know that :)