Nuxeo Developers Blog

Reinout van Rees's EuroPython reports

Reinout van Rees is just doing an amazing job in his blog for EP feedback http://vanrees.org/weblog/

(Post originally written by Tarek Ziadé on the old Nuxeo blogs.)

Seen at Europython: Xapian text search engine

I have been at Michael Salib's talk about Xapian, "Stupidity and laser cat toys: Indexing the US Patent Database with Xapian and Twisted"

Xapian is a probabilistic text search engine.

Michael used to index the US Patent Database, wich is pretty big indeed.He wrote a python wrapper called Xapwrap, that you can get here:

http://divmod.org/projects/xapwrap

Michael explained that Xapian was prefered to Lucene because It easier to wrap into Python and provided faster queries and a better precision.

I'm waiting for Michael to upload the slides on the EP sites to give more precise feedback on this.

More info on PyLucene here: http://www.sauria.com/~twl/conferences/pycon2005/20050325/Pulling Java Lucene into Python.html(PyCon05 notes)

feature-wise, Xapian has eveything needed to run a scalabale text engine.(stemming based on snowball, meta-indexes, etc..) It optionnally uses twisted's python.log for logging.

• Lucene features: http://lucene.apache.org/java/docs/features.html
• Xapian features: http://www.xapian.org/features.php

I have the feeling that Xapian would fit pretty well as an external indexer for z3

(Post originally written by Tarek Ziadé on the old Nuxeo blogs.)

EP 2005 -Day 1

I'm writing a little blog entry atthe end of conference day 1.
A lot of things hapenned already. I could not see all the conference I wanted of course.

About us:

Stéfane presented CPS on a one hour track, trying to show all cool aspect of CPS. Julien tallked on a 30 minutes track about workflows and Florent about his thaught on the future relation/repository tool in Zope 3, based on Zemantic. Slides are available now.

For myself I did a presentation about CPSMailAccess, the CPS webmail. I was pretty happy about the audience reaction, as they found it very usable and ergonomic. Some zope developers told me they will going to try it in other CMS environments (Plone, etc..) ...cool :)

The work we did wih Godefroid during the Sprint on "azax" will surely be reused later in the webmail.

At the end of the day, we went to Guido's keynote. He spoke about some PEPs and the Python Foundation.

Now we're are at Chalmer's hangout with Python Community people and discussion are very interesting.

(Post originally written by Tarek Ziadé on the old Nuxeo blogs.)

CPSMailAccess, EP2005, Slides online

I have uploaded my slides from yesterday's EP2005 presentation, you can grab it here:

http://www.cps-project.org/sections/news/ep_2005_cpsmailaccess
It presents the webmail system framework and how it scales for wide intranets, using stuff like a stateful connector pool.

(Post originally written by Tarek Ziadé on the old Nuxeo blogs.)

Python doctest mode with emacs

python-mode package includes a doctest mode that rocks :
http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/python-mode/python-mode/doctest-mode.el

Sweeeeeeeet........

:)

(Post originally written by Julien Anguenot on the old Nuxeo blogs.)

Zope3 / ECM -- EP2005 sprint : ecmworkflow and architecture draft

The EP sprint is going on in here in Göteborg. I'm working on the workflow component.

Today, I updated the document I wrote 2 days ago about the architecture overview. You can find it there :
http://www.z3lab.org/sections/front-page/white-papers/xpdlcore-zope-wfmc

This is a draft and this is, of course, not in any way the definitive architecture... The idea in here is to put on a paper the ideas and the workflow related stuffs I've been thinking on for couple of time and based on my previous experience on CPSWorkflow. BTW, Anahide wrote a really nice howto document and product to explain the CPSWorkflow in french and english

If you are interested in workflow and ECM I would be please to get feedbacks on this first draft on the Zope3 / ECM architecture.

I'm currently binding zope.wfmc on xpdlcore as xpdl importer. It will be the first step to have the 3 components working together before going further in the development. I hope I could create a branch in Zope3 tomorrow for the 3.2 version of Zope3. The integration of lxml will be needed before this anyway since xplcore uses lxml for parsing xpdl files.

I'll be presenting CPSWorkflow and ecmworkflow at EP on monday. I'll talk about the new features of CPSWorkflow and my first architecture draft and prototype on ecmworkflow with a discussion about the document centric versus activity based workflow models at the same time.

RIght. Now it's beer time (midsummer fest) in here where the days are really long and the night really bright at this time :)

(Post originally written by Julien Anguenot on the old Nuxeo blogs.)

EuroPython 2005 - Zope 3 sprint started

Yesterday has started Zope 3 sprint in Chalmers before Europython.

Among listed subjects people were interested into:

+ repository
+ tools for document type creation, schemas and layout
+ Xicken in Five
+ Workflow
+ Relations
+ Implement a macro portlet
+ Creating an AJAX infrastructure
+ XForms

The day was a dicussion on all this subjects and some demos. Among other demos, Paul Everitt showed us what he has done using AJAX to create a page based on XForms that interacts with preloaded client side datas.

I am highly interested in this subject but I do need to learn more about XForms before I can help on the topic.

After that Godefroid Chapelle and I discussed how could we bring  AJAX into Zope, like Ruby on Rails did, to let the developers use its principles without having to write javascripts.

We have started to list use cases of interest and work on a model. CPSMailAccess has a lot of use cases that were implemented in "raw" javascript and will probably be a good field of investigation for testing what we are going to do.

Since more people will join us today and tomorrow, and since most of the people have not yet decided what they were going to do, I guess i will post tomorrow a more precise list of points with more infos. (the list I gave is most likely to be the draft list)

(Post originally written by Tarek Ziadé on the old Nuxeo blogs.)

Zope-3.1 beta1 released !

Great news : Zope-3.1 went beta during the week-end !

Stephan released it yesterday :
http://www.zope.org/Products/Zope3/3.1.0b1/Zope310b1Released

Notice that the 'X' has been droped. Check the annoucement it's explained within. Basically, we think Zope3 is now more than ready for production use and the compatibility issues with Zope2 will continue to be investigated through the Five component (which is now shipped with Zope-2.8 since the Paris sprint 2005)

I'm pretty happy about it and looking forward to the 3.1 final on my side cause :

1. lxml support on Zope-3.2 arriving.
   
2. inclusion of xplcore and an integration with zope.wfmc.
   

This is part of my work in the scope of the Zope3 / ECM workflow project (ecmworkflow)

I will be annoucing the EP workflow sprint topics that will include basically :

1. Work on xpdlcore : continue the prototype and integrate it with zope.wfmc.
2. Architecture review and coding on ecmworkflow

Zope3 time has come ! :)

(Post originally written by Julien Anguenot on the old Nuxeo blogs.)

CPSWorkflow Documentation

Woke up this morning, can't believe what I saw: CPSWorkflow documentation was out !

You can find it at the following URL:
http://www.cps-project.org/sections/documentation/developers/cpsworkflow/switchLanguage/en
A Zope product comes with this documentation, as it is constructed as a tutorial.

I hope the document construction makes it easy to understand how CPS workflows work, and how powerful they can be.
The sample workflow is quite simple because I did not want to present a complicated example.

Hope you'll enjoy, any kind of feedback is very welcome.

Asynchronous SMTP Mail sender inspired from Zope 3

Background

CPSMailAccess let the user configure the SMTP server he or she wants to use. It can be the same SMTP server for all users, or a different one for each user. Having multiple configuration can sound overkill, but since the application let you browse any mailbox, you might need to associate a different SMTP server to each MailBox

What Zope 3 provides

Zope 3 introduces a pretty cool mechanism: a delivery queue that writes mails into a filesystem dir (a MailDir in fact) and let a thread send them asynchronously.

This is rock-solid, since :

• the work can restart even if Zope hangs: no send will be lost
• the user does not wait

that's exactly what's needeed for large scale intranets. The pattern used is:

• MailWriter: writes mails into the folder
• MailReader: thread, sends mails found into the folder
• MailSender: interface,provide a send method that calls MailWriter, and creates the MailDir

Special headers are inserted in the mail, so extra informations can be shared between the MailWriter and the MailSender.

What CPSMailAccess needs

The only missing feature for CPSMailAccess is to add the SMTP host and port informations into mails that are written into the MailDir.

Those are read by the sender and removed before the mail is sent.

The beta 2 version will include this feature, with a MailWriter-MailReader-MailSender pattern derived from Zope 3 classes.

And thanks to Zope 3 pythonic style, this module can be used in any Python application.

(Post originally written by Tarek Ziadé on the old Nuxeo blogs.)