This week, with the Plone Conference 2008 going on in Washington and the fact I did not attend this conference, I finally made enough time available to get my hands back into Zope again.

So it’s my pleasure to report that after about a week of hard work and a handful of workarounds that will need future cleaning, Zope 2 does now startup under Python 2.6.

My expectation with this now out of my way is that other developers will start looking at adjusting third-party applications (hint: Plone) to run on Python 2.6 as well.

The code is available on the gsoc-python-2.5 branch of the Zope repository, and the lucky guys at the Plone Conference will be amongst the first to hear the good news through Matthew Wilkes, which registered for a stealth Lightning Talk which should get at least some people puzzled. I would love to be there and see their faces when Matthew unveils the surprise.

Big thanks go to Tres Seaver for helping me figure out a change needed in Zope’s private version of ‘medusa’ and to Ranjith Kannikara, our GSoC student through the Zope Foundation, and his friends which did a good chunk of the hard work, namely figuring out changes to the C-based ‘Acquisition’ module and cleaning up string exceptions.

NOTE: This is not intended for production yet, it is just a technology preview to get developers to try out and start porting their own projects. Many bugs still exist, some of which might take up to a month to get fixed. Most importantly, the RestrictedPython implementation has not been fully audited for the new builtins and language constructs introduced since Python 2.4.

According to an article last week on NetworkWorld, “Mozilla generates
the bulk of its income from ties to Google, according to the company’s
latest financial figures. For the 2006 tax year — the most recent
numbers made public by Mozilla — 85%, or about $57 million of the
company’s $67 million in annual revenues for the year, came from
Google.”

My take on this is that Google is really stabbing Mozilla on the back.
A G-Browser in my POV is much more likely to steal users from Firefox
than from Internet Explorer for a reason that should be pretty
obvious: most users that care about the browser they are using are
already using Firefox. The great majority of the remaining ones will
just stick with Internet Explorer as they have been doing all along.

Goodbye Firefox. It was great to have you here while it lasted. And thanks for all the fish.

I’m subscribed to Google Alerts for the keyword Plone, so whenever a new article or page mentioning Plone get’s picked up by Google, I get an email alert.

Today, I got an alert from an article published by Burlington Free Press. The summary in the email alert had the following text:

Northfield teen clocked at 104 mph while talking on cell phone
BurlingtonFreePress.com – Burlington,VT,USA
… driving 104 mph on Interstate 89 told police she was unaware they were
trying to stop her because she was talking on her cell plone, state police
said. …

http://www.burlingtonfreepress.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080617/JS02/80617032

See all stories on this topic:
http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ncl=http://www.burlingtonfreepress.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article%3FAID%3D/20080617/JS02/80617032

Notice the text says ‘cell plone’. Clicking on that link though tells you the article doesn’t exist anymore. If you click on the second link the article shows up and it’s published under a different url, which probably means someone was quick to detect the error, correct and re-publish the article under a different url. Not quick enough for Google’s indexing system though, which was able to index the article before the correction. If you search Google for “cell plone” the original article shows up as the 5th link right now. Unfortunately, the link to the ‘cached’ version of the page does not return the original page.

How would that be possible you ask? Well, a couple things are required.

The Repoze guys have Plone running as a WSGI app, AFAICT. So the hosting part is pretty much settled. You just deploy an app that sets up a Repoze WSGI App.

Then comes the storage. Plone, being based on Zope, uses the ZODB. But the Google App Engine doesn’t allow writing to the filesystem. The solution? Having a RelStorage backend that uses the DataStore API.

The final step would be getting rid of the C extensions in Zope, and having Zope run in Pure Python. Fortunately, there’s a student application for this year’s Google Summer of Code project that intends to port Zope to Jython! That should help with this last step by providing Pure Python implementations of the C extensions, if it gets approved.

I am really excited by the possibilities that this opens up. And would love to see someone pick up this project and turn it into reality.

Some Jabber clients, for example Adium can display the Jabber Resource Name of your contacts. Some Jabber clients use their own name as the Resource Name.

Today while looking at one of my contacts, i saw it had a Resource Name of Crick.v1000xxxxxx. Curious, I’ve tried to search the web for any references to that and only found one meaningful reference, exactly one. And it seems to be from someone at google.com (the person on my contact list was from Google too).

Now, that certainly isn’t from Google Talk, because Google Talk uses a similar but different Resource Name, Talk.v10496B0A851. They are very similar though.

Maybe Crick was Google’s internal codename for Google Talk before launch? Or maybe is the codename for the next version of Google Talk? Who knows…

As for myself, I really loved meeting some long-time friends that I hadn’t seen since PyConBrasil 1, two years ago. After the event I had the opportunity to hang out with Nate Aune, of Plone4Artists fame. We drove from Joinville to Florianopolis, stopping at the Parque Unipraias in Camboriu. View Map

And then, the next day we did some sandboarding at the Joaquina Beach in Florianopolis. We had such a great time. Finally around 9pm we’ve dropped Nate at the Hercilio Luz Airport in Florianopolis and finally headed home, arriving at 4am, completely exausted. View Map

My talk was about my Google Summer of Code project, “Improved out-of-the-box WebDAV experience”. But ended up being more about the Summer of Code than about my project.

Slides available below. It’s a mix of Portuguese and English, so you might actually be able to make sense of it. :)

On my next post I will talk a little bit more about PyConBrasil itself…

Update 1: I’ve merged those changes into Zope 2.10 branch now, so they will be available in the upcoming Zope 2.10.4 release if all goes well.

Update 2: Leslie Hawthorn kindly mentioned my post at the Google Summer of Code Blog. Thank you Leslie!

Hi, my name is Sidnei da Silva, and I’m participating on the Google Summer of Code Program as a Student.

My mentor is Mr. Lennart Regebro, and my mentoring organization is the Plone Foundation, and this is my first Video Status Report for the Google SoC Program.

My Summer of Code project goes by the title of “Improved out-of-the-box WebDAV experience”, and this first phase on the project is extremely important to reach that goal. More on that in a second.

First, a little bit of background.

What is Plone?

• Plone is a really powerful and agile Content Management System
• It’s based on a series of technologies on top of the Zope Application Server
• Which is written in the Python Programming Language

What is Zope?

• It’s the Z Object Publishing Environment

I’m not sure why “Z”, of all letters, was chosen. It’s the last letter of the alphabet! Oh, well. Maybe they felt sad because of that and gave Mr. “Z” a chance.

Anyway, the idea is that you deal with Objects, which are persisted in the ZODB (which stands for the Z Object Database) in an hierarchical fashion. I won’t go into much detail there. So you have Objects, and they are Published through several different “channels”.

Out-of-the-box, Zope ships with a couple different publishing channels that work with little to no configuration: HTTP, WebDAV, FTP and XML-RPC. You can access pretty much any standard Zope Object through any one of those channels.

My personal interest is in accessing and manipulating Zope (and specially Plone) Objects through WebDAV, and having that work with minimal configuration.

Historically, Zope’s WebDAV implementation has worked just fine, though very few people use it. However, as it started getting old, and no one was very interested in maintaining it, things started to fall apart.

The most notable issue was that Windows Web Folders implementation stopped working with Zope, after someone that had problems with it decided that it was easier to just rip out any support for Windows Web Folders than to actually find a solution to the problem.

Thus, my first Summer of Code task was born: making Windows Web Folders work with Zope again, which as a side effect will allow us to use Windows Web Folders with Plone.

A good chunk of the job had already been done by a good soul with the handle “PatrickD”. If you’re looking at this report Patrick, thank you a lot.

Patrick did a great job looking for a solution to the problem, and going back and forth discussing the best way to implement it with the Zope developers, and eventually submitting a patch nearly one year ago, for this issue which is almost 35 months old as of today. The whole history on this issue can be found on the Zope Collector issue 1441. The issue title might give you an idea of how much some Zope Developers care about Windows support.

My task consisted of researching a little bit more on the subject, polishing Patrick’s patch a tad and writing some unit tests for it.

Patrick came to the conclusion that the lack of a “MS-Author-Via: DAV” header in the WebDAV OPTIONS response was what prevented Microsoft Web Folders from properly connecting to Zope. And he was right, in part. That was really the case with the version of Web Folders that was current at the time.

However, Microsoft issued an update in January 2005, and a second update in May 2007 to the Web Folders implementation. The latest update adds support for WebDAV connections over SSL, by using the “https” url scheme. With those updates, they also removed the requirement for the “MS-Author-Via: DAV” header, but now require the presence of a header named “Public:” which lists the WebDAV methods that are available globally across all resources in the server.

Now I’m going to demonstrate the issue, how Microsoft Web Folders fails to connect to Zope, and after enabling the new feature through Zope’s configuration file, how it is then able to successfully connect to Zope.

[Demo]

Those changes should be available in the Zope Version Control Repository by the time you see this. I would like to ask everyone interested in having a properly working WebDAV in Plone and Zope to make suggestions and requests on PLIP (Plone Improvement Proposal) 187, which tracks the status and plans for this Summer of Code work.

I would like to thank Google for allowing me to work on this project, my mentor Lennart for the prodding, and the great Alexander Limi for the motivation and coming up with ideas.

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