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by Jarno Virtanen.
Original Post: Some notes on Zope and EuroPython 2003
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Couple of notes about Zope and EuroPython. I have used Zope, even to
make a living, and I have an interest in it, but since I don't
actually use it nowadays, I did not concentrate on the Zope track in
EuroPython. The Zope track in EuroPython 2003 was huge, but mostly
about Zope 2. I must admit that I am one of those guys who are eagerly
waiting for the Zope 3, or whatever-the-hell-it-is-called, that might
fix some shortcomings commonly known in the Zope community.
To that extent, I went to see Guido who was channeling Jim Fulton on
the State of the Zope Union. I think I understood or had heard of
about half of the stuff mentioned, but the presentation was so filled
with details and acronyms that it was hard to follow (for me, at
least), and I don't remember almost any of it anymore. (Yeah, yeah,
take notes if you want to remember. I know.) So the general impression
I had after the talk was that Zope continues to be that huge, complex
thing inside and miracles are made every day working on it, or
something.
One interesting tidbit for me was the fact that Zope 3 will be
included in the distribution of Zope 2.7, or thereabouts, so you can
play with it even though you can't switch to it yet. The other
interesting thing was this filesystem synchronization project that
Guido himself was working on. The central idea was to connect Zope
items to the filesystem too to have a better integration with stuff
like CVS and command like tools such as grep, sed and so
on. Unfortunately I had to leave before the end of the talk, so I
didn't get to hear all about it. But, nevertheless, interesting things
are happening in the world of Zope, as usual.
The other talk I saw was Stephan Holek's Unit testing Zope for fun and
profit. In my humble opinion, it too had a bit too much of that
general motivational stuff on using unit tests; we all know that
already, yes? (We might not practice what we preach all the time, but
we know it ..) But otherwise, it was a neat lesson on how to do unit
tests in Zope with all the caveats, like having to start the whole
Zope to run tests, uh, and workarounds for them. Basically the
message, I think, was that you should use a thing called ZopeTestCase
which Stephan himself has authored.
Zope got mentioned at Guido's keynote talk too. Guido was talking
about some little annoying features in Python that we would like to
get rid of, hopefully in Python 3. He had this list on a slide and
there were things like range vs. xrange and
string module and such. Then there was a mention of
string exceptions [they were deprecated somewhere around Python 1.6 I
think] to which Guido said something like:
- Man, string exceptions .. I mean, who still uses them?
To which somebody in the audience said:
- Zope!
And the audience laughed hysterically. After the laughter settled down
Guido said that from now on it is forbidden to joke about Zope when he
is in the room. Har, har. But seriously, I have heard that Zope people
are constantly cleaning up and refactoring the code base, and it might
even work with Python 2.2 in the future; near future, I think.
All in all, the Zope track was impressive and huge from outsider's
view, that is, I didn't get to see much of it. All the best for the
Zope people, anyway. And I think there were a lot of people
in EuroPython 2003 just for the Zope track, so it continues to be an
important part of the Python community. (And I can't wait to see and
play with Zope 3.)
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