Month: September 2016

Zope Resurrection Part 1 – Reanimation

Now we are helping Zope in the Python 3 wonderland: Almost 20 people started with the reanimation of Zope. We are working mostly on porting important dependencies of Zope to Python 3:

Zope 4 is now per default based on WSGI. Thanks to Hanno who invested much time to make the WSGI story of Zope much more streamlined.

We found out that the ZTK (Zope Toolkit) is no longer used in any of the projects using packages of it (Zope, Grok, Bluebream – as it is dead). It should be kept to test compatibility between the packages inside the ZTK.

Last minute information for remote Sprinters for the Zope Resurrection Sprint

As the Zope Resurrection sprint is approaching, it seems useful to share some information on the schedule for the three days in Halle. As we have also some sprinters, who can not join on site, but might want to join remotely, a few key facts might come in handy.

Etherpad

There is the Etherpad, where the current list of topics is collected. Most of the stories we are going to tackle will be based on this list. In case you have something to add, or are interested in a specific topic in particular, it is a good idea to add your thoughts before the start of the sprint.

IRC Channel

During the sprint we will communicate via the #sprint channel on irc.freenode.net, so additional information and questions can be placed there.

Google Hangout

As the sprint is also intended to foster discussions about the future of Zope, we want to encourage as many people as possible to join. Therefore, we have a hangout where we will meet.

Scheduled Discussions

At the moment we plan the following session:

  • Wednesday 2016-09-28 10:00 CEST, duration 1 h: Introduction to WSGI in Zope 4 by Hanno Schlichting (hannosh) + discussion
  • Wednesday 2016-09-28 14:00 CEST, duration 2 h: Discussion about through-the web (TTW) pattern and the underlying RestrictedPython
  • Thursday 2016-09-29 10:00 CEST, duration 0.5 h: Discussion about the necessity and future of ZTK
  • Friday 2016-09-30 14:00 CEST, duration 1 h: Discussion about the Zope 5

So in case you want to contribute remotely to the sprint, please join us on one of the three ways.

 

Zope in the Python 3 wonderland

A little tale

Once upon the time there was the big mighty Zope II. It was one of the leaders in the Python land. It had mighty features like TTW (trough the web) development and its own object oriented database. Many people liked Zope II and trusted it to be the basis for their personal work and the work of their companies.

After some years Zope II got a son named Zope III. It could have been even mightier and more trustworthy than Zope II. But some people argued that Zope III is too complex and too hard to understand and way too different from Zope II which they knew very well.

New, faster and easier to understand frameworks arose beside Zope II and Zope III and the people began to like the new ones more. After many years of power, Zope became weak. Its name got hated by many people in its country. It even got nearly forgotten.

But there are still the people out in the far away kingdoms who built a complete ecosystem on the shoulders of Zope. They cannot completely change the basis of their work within months or even years. They deserve a perspective even for the Python 3 wonderland which is no longer a vague dream but already a future with wide open doors.

Back in reality

We are here to help Zope to find a new home in the Python 3 land and live there happily a great many years. Therefore we scheduled a Sprint named Zope Resurrection Sprint where we will discuss and code on Zope to get it more Python 3 ready.

The big blocker is currently RestrictedPython which relies on modules which are no longer in the Python 3 standard library. But RestrictedPython is an important part of the TTW security concept, so it has to be rewritten from scratch. Folks who think they do not need TTW in their projects can work on a Zope where RestrictedPython is optional.

Besides the Python 3 migration of the code the contents of the application databases using Zope need a conversion, too. On a previous sprint in Berlin, we wrote a possible solution: zodb.py3migrate which needs some more tests with real databases.

Furthermore, there is Zope IV, the successor of Zope II which needs some love to become strong and ready for its adventurous journey as the basis of Plone VI and others.

It is still possible to join the sprint either in Halle (Saale), Germany or remote. We are looking forward to a good time to put up the banner of Zope in the Python land again.

zodb.py3migrate: Migrate an existing ZODB Data.fs to be used with Python 3

At Berlin Strategic sprint 2016 we developed a tool to analyze a ZODB Filestorage to find Python 2 string objects. If they are in an encoding besides ASCII this is preventing using this Filestorage with Python 3 because of decoding errors arising on loading the pickles.
The tool is even able to convert those strings either to unicode by decoding them using a configurable encoding or convert them to zodbpickle.binary so Python 3 will read them as bytes.
There is documentation of the tool and a repository on GitHub where the code lives.

There are still some questions open:

  • Is there already another tool for this analysis/migration?
  • Is there already any practical knowledge migrating Filestorage contents to Python 3?
  • Do you think such a tool is the right approach to achieve such a migration?
  • Is there anyone who wants to try out the tool on a Filestorage of a personal project and share the experiences? (We analyzed two projects where we have access to a Filestorage but we are sure this does not catch all the edge cases.)