Jean-Marc's slides for his Europython 2005 talk are now online.

One great thing about his talk is that he's come up with a "Top 10 reasons to use CPSSkins" which are:

• 10. modify your site design without restarting the server
• 9. cache page fragments without setting up a Squid
• 8. create a design that works on all CSS2-compliant browsers
• 7. do tableless design without spending hours on it
• 6. respect Web standards without reading the W3 specs
• 5. create visual variation across your site
• 4. prevent content creators from altering the site's design
• 3. allow content creators to be more creative, but not too much
• 2. focus on form and content and not just on technique
• 1. don't reinvent the wheel, spend time on real development

One can read more background information about CPSSkins in Jean-Marc's last year talk (but this was before the introduction of portlets into the framework, so things have changed quite a bit this last year).

I think that CPSSkins doesn't yet have the success it deserves, probably because people don't yet get the whole advantage they can get from using it, and this is a shame because it is really a terrific product.

The Economic Majority (against software patents) webstite now has more than 1500 supporters which is already a fair number, but could use even more support before the software patents directive get voted by the European Parliament next week.

There are also many more testimonies than last time I checked.

Unfortunately, some MEPs, like Mr Edward McMillan-Scott (brittish, conservative, vice-president of the Parliament) don't seem to get it, and still believe that software patents will protect the small business against the big corporations (they don't seem to have read a single line of all the economic litterature that has been written on the subject, and certainly not listened to the real entrepreneurs out there).

My slides are now online.

I tried to give a rather technical talk, by emphasising the innovative aspects of CPS (repository, proxies, workflows, shemas, documents, directories...).

It was still an introduction however, more technical details can be found in Julien's ( CPSPortlets: architecture overview, CPS3/Z3ECM: from stateful to activity-based workflow), Florent's ( Versioning and relation management in a Zope ECM), Tarek's ( CPSMailAcces: a webmail for CPS3) and Jean-Marc's (CPSSkins) talks this year, as well as Julien's talks last year.

Here is a non-exhaustive list of what people have been doing during the sprint, as was reported during the sprint wrapup:

Jean-Marc Orliaguet: has ported (in fact totally rewrote) CPSSkins for Zope3. The "main content area" (the place where the current document or folder is displayed) is now a portlet like all the other portlets.

Ph. von Weitershausen: we need a common vocabulary for portlets, pagelets, whatever. Otherwise it gets confusing.

Tres Seavers: has worked on the pipeline machinery. The point is to be able to define series of transformations that apply to an input. A pipeline is a list of callable objects. For example, a pipeline that converts an XML document to a DOM, then does something to the DOM like adding some elements, then converts it back to a string. The code for pipeline itself is not very interesting.

Tarek Ziadé / Godefroid Chappelle: AJAX development for Zope = AZAX. We have created a model where yuo creat .azax files that are combined with .pt files, and a preprocessor creates on the fly the JavaScript code that is included in the HTML page. Everything else is standard AJAX. The benefit for the developer is that he/she doesn't have to write complex JS code.

Florent Guillaume: after I started coding a proxy model for Z3, I realized that the proxy model is too complex and that there are many risks associated. And I've decided to go back to a more traditional model with checkins/checkouts. I'll be presenting that at EuroPython tomorrow.

Here are some stats about the laptops used by the zope sprinters in Europython:

• 13 Apple notebooks (all of them 15'' Titanium btw)
• 5 Dell notebooks
• 1 IBM X40 subnotebook
  
• 1 ASUS S5 subnotebook (mine :) )
• 2 no-name notebooks (MITAC)

All the non-Apple notebooks seem to be running some variant of Linux (no Windows in sight).

Some of the titanium seem brand new, and all their owners seem to be proud of using the "world's most advanced obsolete computer" :)

I'm at the Z3ECM sprint in EuroPython 2005 and I've spent yesterday trying to play with the JCR (Java Content Repository aka JSR-170) trying to understand

1. how easy it would be to how a Zope content management system into a JCR (short answer: not easy - despite of claims of interoperability, JCR is a 100% Java technology).
   
2. if there are useful ideas in the JCR that could be put into the design of the repository for Z3ECM (short answer: probably, yes)

Hooking Zope into a JCR

After installing Jackrabbit (an open source implementation of the JCR made by the Apache project) and testing it with some Java examples, I've trying calling it from Python using the JPype Java<->Python bridge.

Installing Jackrabbit is not that hard, it took me about one hour though since I haven't done any Java development since 1996 and didn't have all the right tools (including Maven and a dozen of libraries like xalan, xerces, log4j, etc.) from the Apache Java project installed. Not a big deal anyway.

Unfortunately, JPype is pretty much a work in progress, that would benefit from more users and developers. There are, seemingly, limitations that prevented me from login in the JCR so this experiment didn't succeed and my knowledge of Java is much to light to keep on the experiment.

If we succeed in hooking Python/Zope into a JCR (which is, overall, just a question of Java/JNI knowledge and grunt work), I think the most important question is how the to make Zope and Java transactions systems work well together (transactions are an optional JSR-170 feature, but I don't see how a repository without transactions would be useful at all).

Ideas from the JCR specs

A JCR is a repository of nodes stored in whatever you want (flat files, SQL DB, object DB, XML DB...). Nodes are just collections of properties, so it's a very data-centric model that doesn't impose a programming model, and would work very well outside of Java. In practice, Nodes are the documents you're managing with you application. Nodes can be accessed from a path (hierarchical navigation, something Zope developpers are very familiar with), or by UUID (unique identifiers). More interesting are:

1. Querying nodes, which is based on a simplified XPath query language, or, optionally, a variant of SQL
   
2. XML import/export, which would provide interoperability between repositories at list in the sense that you can import data from one repository to another (no vendor lock-in)
   
3. Versionning
4. Events
   

Overall, nothing very different from what we are already doing with the CPS Repository (from CPSCore), but it's interesting to try to dig a bit further in the specs and to keep then in our minds when designing the Z3ECM model for the repository, querying, and versionning.

Related standards

The WebDAV/DeltaV standard for versionning and its JCP interpretation (JSR-147) are related to these specifications.

I did a presentation yesterday at the ObjectWeb consortium architect seminar about "Python for middleware scripting" (trying to push Python to a Java crowd - not that easy). The slides are available (PDF, 800 kb). If you have comments on the slides (which were written in a bit of a hurry without the time to check all the information), I'd be glad to hear from you (-> sf@nuxeo.com).

Here is a message I just got from FFII regarding the upcoming vote on software patents in the European Parliament.

If the Directive is adopted in second reading by the Parliament, it would mean a tremendous blow to the european IT SMEs (and probably also some of the major players too) as well as for free / open source software projects who will have to sustain in the near future vicious attacks from our american competitors (and probably some others).

It seems there is still a little hope left, so we'd better not lose the last chances we have to change to course of the european IT history. It's time to act now.

Here is the mail:

Dear Stefane Fermigier, CEO, Nuxeo,

1) The vote in the Second Reading on the software patent directive is in 11-13 work days, on 5-7 July.

2) Lobbying in Brussels is heavy, currently there is much pressure on MEPs by pro-software-patent companies. The pro-patent lobby has about 30 lobbyists more than we, mostly wearing the hat of SMEs.

3) Your action is needed, at http://noepatents.eu.org/ we maintain a list of what you can do as an SME and as an individual. Especially we advise to see your MEP soon and, if you can speak for an SME, to visit the Economic Majority conference 29 June Brussels http://www.economic-majority.com/konf050629/. Please decide to come the conference early, so that a date with your MEP or with his/her assistant can be arranged in advance.
With kind regards,

Hartmut Pilch, Gérald Sédrati-Dinet, FFII

Ca fait toujours plaisir :)

Le gouvernement sénégalais s'équipe librement d'un intranet (JDNet Solutions, 8 juin 2005).

Du coup on a commencé à rédiger une étude de cas sur le site nuxeo.com.

Vu sur le site de XTech 2005, une présentation ( slides PDF - texte html) très intéressante sur le format OASIS OpenDocument (anciennement connu sous le nom de Open Office XML), autrement dit le futur format standard d'OpenOffice.org 2.0.

Il y a sans doute des informations utiles pour une nouvelle mise à jour du livre blanc Indesko OpenOffice.org: l'avantage XML.