Baiju Muthukadan's Blog

Zope project and the community in general use lots of namespaces packages. Though, we have some non-namespace packages like ZODB3,ZConfig etc. Zope community has created many namespaces for packages like `zope`, `zope.app`, `zc`, `z3c`, `lovely` etc. Here `zc` stands for Zope Corporation, `z3c` for Zope 3 Community and lovely for Lovely Systems' packages. Python is a language with namespace support at many levels. Remember, the last line of Zen of Python reads like this: "Namespaces are one honking great idea -- let's do more of those!" Take it positively, don't interpret it more ;) A namespace package will not have any method,class or any other objects defined in that level. So a normal namespace package will be only having an empty `__init__.py` file. Eggs and setuptools provides some new advantages for the distribution of namespace packages. So, normally a namespace package's `__init__.py` file will contain something like this: import pkg_resources ...

Yesterday Philip announced zopeproject 0.4 . This is the easiest way to getting started with Zope 3. I have created a screencast here . I used virtualenv for installing zopeproject, and it was really cool.

Today Anand B. Pillai (one of BangPypers list moderator and HarvestMan fame) with help from Jeff Rush moved BangPypers mailing list from Yahoo! groups to python.org . Thanks to Anand and Jeff Rush ! The initial motivation for this move was Brad Allen from Dallas Ft. Worth Pythoneers . He had a talk ("Python user groups unite!") at Bangalore Barcamp 4 in last july. He talked about Python advocacy and what Python user groups can do for this. He also gave lots of tips for running a successful user group from his experience at Dallas group. Thanks Brad for all this. BTW, There is mailing list created for "Support and Mentoring of Usergroup Organizers (Current or Wannabe)" . Also there is a Usergroup advocacy list.

Today I found this blog in blogosphere : http://www.lorenzogil.com/blog/ ( I couldn't find name of blogger anywhere in that site) The blogger has started writing some articles for Django programmers who want to use (or sitch to) Zope 3. So far there are three parts published . I think these articles will be useful for any Zope 3 programmers . Congratulations to the author ! BTW, In the first article the blogger mention that Python 2.5 cannot be used, but it's not true anymore. My student (Nikhil N from Kerala, India) has successfully ported Zope 3 to Python 2.5 as part of Google Summer of Code 2007. But Python 2.5 will not be officially supported until Zope 2 is also ported (This is a Zope Community policy, Yes ! we will not drop Zope 2 for anything, even for Python 3.x !!) . Zope Foundation had four GSoC projects and all of them are successfully completed. We will write more about this later.

Congratulations to Guido and all other Python developers ! Today I came to office for some works, but when I looked at planet.python.org I found many posts about Python 3.0 alpha1 release. Then I downloaded Python 3.0 from here: http://www.python.org/download/releases/3.0/ Here is my first "Hello World" program after compilation: And here is the digg story (Digg it!): http://digg.com/programming/Python_3_0a1_Released BTW, it would be really useful if "2to3" is available as egg. Zope 3 has started discussing about Python 3 port , but it looks like no one is interested. One of my favorite toolkit is PyGTK, and see they are really going to port it soon . But it will be only released after Python 3.0 final release.