Baiju Muthukadan's Blog

(This post's target audience are readers of Python, Zope & Plone planets.) This year's FOSS.IN/2007 is coming up next month from December 4th to 8th at National Science Symposium Centre, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India. FOSS.IN is one of the world's largest FOSS events, held annually in India. The event's main focus is on development and contributions to FOSS from India. So, most of the talks are related to FOSS contributions. I also will be presenting a talk about contributing to Zope project . Well, my original talk I submitted was a general Python talk, which got rejected, so I also ended up with a talk like this. There is another talk related to Zope and Plone by Sreekanth S.R . During the event, BangPypers will be conducting some BOF sessions. We welcome all Python programmers to BangPypers BOF sessions. Me & Nikhil N (last year GSoC student who worked on Python 2.5 porting of Zope 3) planing to work on some Zope projects at hack center. ...

This is a section I added to ZCA book recently. I am not a pattern guru, so please correct me if anthing is not correct or required more explanation. Thanks ! Adapter pattern ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ The adapter concept in Zope Component Architecture and the classic `adapter pattern` as described in Design Patterns book are very similar. But the intent of ZCA adapter usage is more wider than the `adapter pattern` itself. The intent of `adapter pattern` is to convert the interface of a class into another interface clients expect. This allows classes work together that couldn't otherwise because of incompatible interfaces. But in the `motivation` section of Design Patterns book, GoF says: "Often the adapter is responsible for functionality the adapted class doesn't provide". ZCA adapter has more focus on adding functionalities than creating a new interface for an adapted object (adaptee). ZCA adapter lets adapter classes extend functionality by adding methods. (It would...

Lorenzo Gil Sanchez ( Gazpacho fame) is working on a Spanish translation of ZCA book ( PDF ). It was a surprise for me to see a new bzr branch at Launchpad for Spanish translation . Kent Tenney was also excited, keep up the good work, Lorenzo ! I have published his translation in my site ( PDF ). If anyone want to help him with this translation or start a new translation to another language, you can simply create bzr branch there and start working it. Since I am involved in Zope 3, I become a heavy svn user. Now, after I started using bzr for this project I realized the power of bzr (This may be applicable to other DVCS). Currently we have three active branches, the feature I like very much is merging from other branches (Oh ! it's really cool). Thanks to Canonical for providing such a nice hosting for bzr. After all Launchpad is a ZCA based application, then how it won't be cool ? ;) Since I published this work in last month, there was almost 5000 hits for ZCA ...

I got good comments for my last post about ZCA book ( PDF ). Thanks to all those who commented in my journal. Few days back, Kent Tenney suggested to host this project in a public repository, so that, others can also contribute. Then, he himself setup a Lauchpad project for the book . Details about how to contribute is given in the README.txt file there. I hope you will create a branch there :) Kent Tenney also created a nice logo:

Few days back Stephan Richter released Zope 3.4 second beta release . The Zope 3.4 release may be the last release of Zope 3 release as a single package. There is still a minor chance for a 3.5 release. Anyway, Zope 3 as a single package is coming to an end. I won't be surprised if the term "Zope 3" itself vanish in the future. This is a good thing for the future of Zope project & community. As I implied in one of my last post , Zope is becoming more "Pythonic". Well, I am not going to describe "What is Pythonic" :) . You know, Zope is even dropping the server business ! (Zope 3 used Twisted web server as the default server for a long time). We also retired zope3-dev list last month . For those who using Zope 3.3 or earlier versions, Zope 3.4 is a chance (may be last) for migrating to egg and buildout based system for development and deployment. Now you might wonder, "Where is Zope going ?" . This is a very difficult question for m...

Last week, Kent Tenney send me a cool Firefox trick for ZCA reference lookup . His suggestions helped me to improve English style and usage in that book (Thanks Kent!). With this cool trick you can go to a reference section just typing 'zca ' follwed by the word all in small letters. I am quoting his message as such: I just created a Firefox bookmark with the following properties: Name: Zope Component Architecture Location: http://www.muthukadan.net/docs/zca.html#%s Keywork: zca Now, when I type in the Firefox location bar: zca getadapter I'm taken to the reference for that method. Handy! Kent , I reused this nice trick for another purpose also :) To render reST page as HTML you can create a bookmark like this: Name: reST to HTML Location: http://api.rst2a.com/1.0/rst2/html?uri=%s&style=zope Keywork: r2h Thanks to rst2a.com team ! Now whenever I see a reST file online, I just prefix it with 'rst ', this gives me a nice HTML page ! Text below is for my Kerala ...