Yesterday was the third day of the Z3ECM / CPS4 sprint.

Florent and Dario are now able to create complex Zope3 schemas from the JackRabbit schemas. There is now a nuxeo.capsule package that contains just base classes and a nuxeo.jcr package that contains the parser. The next steps are to create new node types in the JCR, export them at startup, and have Zope to parse them as interfaces and schemas. Then we have to find out how to exactly use them.

Jean-Marc took the upcoming Zope 2.10 branch (w/ Philipp's and Jim's branches) and get all the ZCML files parsed and the utilities registered, etc. Then he started to look at Jim's refactoring of local utilities to use the same API. He is now half-way in getting something that works. The next step is to register these utilities in Zope 2.

Michael got the Zope 3 publisher to work in Zope 2 for ZServer.You can now use all the 4 combinations of Zope 2 publisher vs. Zope 3 publisher, and ZServer vs. Twisted.

Tarek has worked on a CPSResourceLibrary, similar to zc.resourcelibrary. It's now finished. Joachim has used it on some portlets. Tomorow Tarek is going to look into the use cases of the JS library packaged on monday in CPS 3.4.

Yesterday was the second day of the Z3ECM / CPS4 sprint.

Michael and Lennart have got Zope 2 working on a Twisted server. They are using the Zope 3 publisher now in Zope 2. No benchmarking has been done yet. The code lives in Sidnei's publication-refactor branch of Zope2 (Sidnei did most of the work).

Tarek, Joachim and Jean-Marc have worked on CPSSkins integration. There were many branches. They finally landed on a Philikon branch where Jean-Marc did all the hard work. Tarek is now working on a "resource library" for Zope 2. Joachim is trying to use the JS library package that was created yesterday manually.

Florent and Dario have written an importer for JCR schemas expressed in CND notation. They have a parser for that and are able to build a Zope 3 schema from it. They are now stuck on the fact that the JCR can have children with the same name.

The sprint has started yesterday with notable guests Jean-Marc and Dario from Chalmers, Joachim from AixtraWare, and Michael from OpenApp, and a bunch of Nuxeo guys.

The goal is still to provide Zope3 ECM components for CPS4

Yesterday morning was spent discussing the AJAX and JavaScript MVC features of CPSSkins v3 (more info in Jean-Marc's numerous messages in the mailing list, or on the z3lab website).

Then we had a discussion about the JCR content model and the JCR schemas for documents (JackRabbit's CND).

In the afternoon, work has proceeded in pairs or small groups.

Florent and Dario have investigated existing schemas sytems and are trying to find a common subset. Now, they will code and write an importer for the JCR schemas.

Lennart and Michael are looking on how to plug the Zope3, Twisted-based, publisher into Zope2.

Jean-Marc, Tarek and Joachim are working on AJAX and CPSSkins. They have created small package of all the ressources used by cpsskins so that they can be reused in CPS. The goal now is to instanciate de Zope 3 CPSSkins utilities in Zope 2, look for breakages, and fix them.

Bogdan is working on Apogee integration through ICE.

Two signs that the CPS4 project has officially started:

• Florent has committed a roadmap in the SVN. (This roadmap will obviously be the basis for next week sprint at Nuxeo's office in Paris).
• The CPS4 mailing list is now open for the community (and last week's private discussion archives are available too).

Now, you may ask, "what is CPS4?"

In a couple of sentences, that will be expanded in upcoming blog postings: CPS4 is the evolution of CPS3 towards more openness and more scalability. We keep all the ECM functions we like in CPS framework (the repository, the documents schemas, the directories, events, skins, portlets, relations...) , and we leverage both the work done on the Z3ECM project, and the offering of the Apache project (Lucene, Jackrabbit) and a few other established infrastructure Java projects. Last thing: we plan to use the ICE high-performance communication engine for communication between the different components.

FAQ: "Is the CPS 3.4 branch still supported?" R: of course, we also plan to do a CPS 3.4.1 release very soon.

As you already know, I have started two weeks ago tagging (and asking others to tag) their CPS sites on del.icio.us with the tag "cps-site". I think we have spotted about 80 public CPS sites so far, but I'm sure many are still missing.

BTW: how do you know a website is a CPS site? There are several clues: 1. Look at the icon, if present. 2. Look at the urls (if it contains "section" it's probably a CPS site). 3. Look at the HTTP "Server" header.

Now I have a similar idea: there are many Trac site out there, and Trac is one of the "Python killer-apps". So let's tag also Trac sites with the trac-site tag and see what happens.

Packaging CPS is important for ease of installation. Unfortunately, it is also a great deal of effort, but an effort that can be distributed between the original software developers and third-party packagers.

The situation so far for CPS is that we have:

• the "big tarball", that installs itself on a fresh Zope 2.9 instance, made by the CPS dev. team.
• the Windows installer, which installs Python + Zope + CPS + additional librairies + additional software (converters), made by Ruslan.
• the Debian/Ubuntu packages, made by the Debian Zope Packaging Team, and specially Fabio Tranchitella
• Gerardo Puerta has made an ebuild for Gentoo.

There are some areas were would benefit from some external help, though:

• We are still working on the Mac OS X installer, for which some preliminary code has been written, but I have been told that the current approach is a dead-end and we need to start afresh with a new approach.
• There are still not satisfactory RPM packages for common distributions like Fedora, Mandriva or OpenSuse.

Packaging Zope and Zope applications under Linux is challenging, because you have to accomodate both people who just want "one click install" (using apt-get / yum / urpmi), but also provide the basis for rock-solid, possibly multi-instances, Zope server management (including easy instance creation / deletion, log rotation, service initialisations, etc.) without compromising security. The Debian Zope team seems to have done a lot of work to streamline this process for Zope.

Regarding CPS, any help in improving the existing packages, or in making new packages kinds available, would be really appreciated. If you feel in a packaging mood, join the cps-devel mailing list and let's start working together.

Our friend at CEA (French Atomic Energy Commission) have been awarded "best project of the year" in the "public administration" category of the competition organised by the french magazine "Le Monde Informatique" (an IDG publication). They have been using CPS for 3 years and now have 129 instances in production.

According to the article (p. 19), the use of CPS has allowed for 1.9 to 3.8 millions Euros savings over 3 years.

(Note: last year, CPS won 2 awards in the same competition, one for CNCC.fr and a second one for Ardeche.fr! Check for yourself in last year's article).

Yesterday, following a suggestion of Tarek, we have started tagging public (internet) websites developped with CPS on del.icio.us with the tag cps-site.

After one day, we already have more than 60 sites. Not bad, for a system that we know is more often used for intranets (ECM, if you prefer) than for internet websites.

Please join the "CPS sites hunt" and add the tag to your sites.