Learning Zope 3 Step-by-Step

Last year there were a few people who had trouble getting into the sprints. Often sprints are about working -on- some project internals, adding a feature or fixing bugs. But this may require more experience with that project than some attendees have. For example, when you're just getting into Zope 3, it's hard to partner with a Zope 3 guru, due to Zope's inherent complexity.

Therefore I'm volunteering to run a 4-day sprint about working -with- Zope 3 instead of inside it. Think of it as a full-day tutorial, but at no cost to you and perhaps a bit less structured. I would have offered it as a regular tutorial but this will be the first class of this type I've done and I didn't think it fair to charge for a alpha tutorial. ;-)

Heavy on exercises, we'll walk through several tasks of implementing new components using Zope 3 and hopefully by the end everyone will have a good hands-on understanding of how it all works.

Interested Participants

• Jeff Rush (jeff AT taupro DOT com) Coach/Organizer
• J. Jentink, attendee, member Dallas Ft. Worth Pythoneers
• Brad Allen, attendee, member of Dallas/Ft. Worth Pythoneers
• Ralph Green, Jr., attendee, member of Dallas/Ft. Worth Pythoneers
• William (Bill) Chipman, attendee, member of Dallas/Ft. Worth Pythoneers
• Roland Hedberg, attendee
• Don Kauffman, attendee
• Kevin Cole
• Jeff Kunce, attendee
• Wade Leftwich, attendee
• Edward Muller (edwardam (at) interlix (dot) com), attendee
• Jeffrey Elkner, attendee
• Alan Elkner, attendee
• Linda Huynh, attendee

Topics Covered:

• Basic installation, instance setup, where key files are located
• Concepts overview: interfaces, schemas, utilities, adapters
• Component lookup resolution algorithm: used *everywhere* in Zope
• Hanging simple views onto the root folder
• Creating choice sources (replacement of vocabularies) from simple list, to token:label pairs to context-dependent sublists.
• About widgets: automatic layout to semi-automatic layout
• Creating your own widgets: monetary currency and calendar widgets
• Using relational databases: how to avoid the ZODB entirely, when necessary
• ??? (suggestions welcome)

Update from PyCon on Saturday

This sprint will run as long as there are interested people, not just one day. We will start at 10am on Monday morning, although we are also holding a laptop setup and overview gathering Sunday night. Check the open-space board for the room and time.

If possible, please have the following software installed on your laptop:

• Zope 3.3.1 (latest stable)
• Python 2.3 or 2.4 (not 2.5)
• Psycopg2 for talking to the PostgreSQL? database
• a PostgreSQL? server

Note: We may not play with the relational database, depending on how many get their environment setup up for it and group interest.