Greg Ward wrote:
>
> On 12 November 2001, Jeff Rush said:
> > I did this for
> > Zope (I'm the Zope RPM maintainer) and now you can get RPMs for
> > Quixote at:
> >
> >   http://www.taupro.com/static/RPMs/
>
> Cool.  I'll add a link to the main Quixote page.  Just which RPM-based
> distribution is this for, anyways?

For Red Hat 7.1


> > After wrestling with Zope for years
>
> Wow, you must be a very patient man.  We struggled with Zope for four or
> five months before we know that it was Just Wrong.

Some parts of Zope are quite nice and make life easier but others
are frustrating.  After working with Quixote for a day, I'm finding
I have a lot of questions about basic support infrastructure that
I took for granted in Zope.

* Quixote doesn't seem to put in BASE_URL directives in generated
  html output, making it a bit clumsy to construct relative URLs.

* I'm looking for the equivalent of url_quote and html_quote to
  wrap strings in python-generated output.

* I'm looking for how to require a basic auth login on selected
  pages -- need to do something re request.response.set_status(...)
  and check for http header auth fields.  I need Zope's userID
  framework on top of which to build security features.

* what are form tokens in session objects?

* need the equivalent of  for debugging.

* not sure of correct way to handle URLs with '.' in them,
  as in programmatically generated .gif responses.  Looks like
  it requires _q_name() ?

* I miss a whole set of URL path manipulation functions, although
  I think I can get by with os.path.XXX in most cases.  Mostly
  I just need a 'parent' or 'container' request attribute.

* any better way of inserting ?x=1&y=2 style values than:

  """testing %(x)s and %(y)s""" \
    % { 'x': request.form['x'], 'y': request.form['y'] }

  This is where the namespace searching of Zope re attrs, form
  and environ variables was nice.

Some of these are just novice issues and for others, I can
write/wrap solutions but I thought I'd check if anyone else
has solutions first.


> > I'm hoping to dump Solid and Fnorb for ZEO/ZODB instead, with the
> > business logic residing in a separate namespace, as discussed
> > last month on this mailing list.
>
> Hey wow, we used to use Solid too.  SQL sucks, eh?

SQL, and Fnorb/CORBA, both require you to rigidly predeclare your
types/interfaces, and while I understand the benefits of such,
it makes an impedance mismatch with python's more free form way.
Switching to ZODB will improve rapid developing.


> One major thing you need to remember about ZEO is that security is
> entirely up to you (ie. your firewall and/or which interface(s) ZEO
> binds to).  Once someone is talking to the ZEO socket, they have
> complete, total, and unhindered access to your database.  OK, SQL
> doesn't *completely* suck.  ;-)

Yeah, that affects the architecture, but in my case, ZEO is binding
to a unix socket and the apache/quixote process is on the same host.
I just need ZEO to allow nonweb tools to access the ZODB at the same
time pages are being served - email-API queries and cron maint tasks.


> Feel free to ask for advice on how to write a Quixote app on top of
> ZODB/ZEO.  That's what we do for a living.  It works pretty well.

At the moment I'm wondering the best way to hook it in.  I've subclassed
SessionPublisher into a ZODBSessionPublisher, to
begin/commit_transactions
in ZODB, but now I'm wondering if I would have been better to subclass
SessionManager instead. My approach works, but any advice?  Quixote
could use a sample app showing that, catching certain http responses
and rolling back ZODB.


> Oh, be sure to ask for our zeod script -- Andrew and Neil have fixed
> many bogosities; I don't know how many have gotten back into ZC's CVS.

I'd like to see that -- I packaged ZEO as an RPM yesterday as well,
and wrote the /etc/init.d/zeo-style scripts to make mgmt easier
as well as set the correct file perms on logs, databases, etc. etc.
for a more seamless install.  The ZEO tarball doesn't tell all you
need to know for a quick/secure installation.

-Jeff Rush