3-25-03 Zope3 Sprint
I'm sitting in the "Sprint Room" at the pre-Python conference workshops. I'm
working on Zope 3, something I keep revisiting in the hopes that eventually it
will sink in. In fact this strategy seems to be working; Jim Fulton's
presentation made a lot more sense to me yesterday than it did a year ago
(of course, Zope 3 has changed and so has the presentation).
This sprint is on internationalization; Nathan Yergler and I are working on the
"job board" demo example. The first thing we discovered is that there was a bug
in the internationalization code in Zope 3, so we spent most of our time chasing
that down, finally with the help of Barry Warsaw. It was valuable to gain
greater familiarity with the code base. We are now back to creating a variant of
the job board that demonstrates internationalization (I18n) features.
I woke up with an epiphany, in thinking about the little hurdles that keep me
from doing things. To update the FAQ list on this site, there are a number of
steps. Not a great number, nothing particularly onerous, but enough for me to
put the job off while replying to someone's question -- which would be the
perfect time to do it. What I'd love is to be able to add to the FAQ without
changing gears. Also, there are many people who would like to add web content
without learning or remembering a number of steps, even as simple as those
necessary to use Zope's through-the-web interface.
The experience working with BackTalk, and evolving it through many different
incarnations until we ended up with the most current, email-based system made me
think: Zope has an FTP interface and a through-the-web interface. Why not an
"email interface" that allows you to associate an email address with a zope
method? That way, the programmer could do anything in response to email. For
example, I could add to this web log by sending an email to the appropriate
address, or to the FAQ list. I could write the code to do whatever I wanted in
response to that email, so the possibilities could be quite significant.
I presented the idea to Jim this morning and he seemed to think it might be
useful, so perhaps it will end up in Zope 3 someday. I'll probably ask Evan to
see if we can do something for the FAQ list using Zope 2.
