Tom Hoffman: K12Zope

Hey, me too, except I don't live in Salt Lake City. My band played in Salt Lake City once, though. And we took a tour of the DOD factory and met the guy who invented the "Grunge" pedal.

Props to Joseph Kocherans for his Formulator tip yesterday. A Zope User, a Mac OS X User, an iBook User, a Sonic Youth listener, and apparently in or near Salt Lake. The statistics for that are much higher than I ever would have expected. [Industrie Toulouse]
Thanks for the link. Yes, I'm guilty on all counts. I'm in Salt Lake. I'm not sure if there's another place I could stand to live in in this state unless I was retired or something. [hoarfrost: zope, etc.]

This article in adtmag (lost track of where I found the link) has a good overview of open source application servers from a business point of view:

Striking a balance
Organizations should look at not only striking a balance between open-source and commercial products, but also between low- and high-end servers, according to research firm Gartner Inc., Stamford, Conn. This way, they will get better value for their money. Rather than standardize on a single-platform application server architecture, Gartner recommends using a low-end server for less-demanding, user-facing applications and a high-end application server for transaction-heavy applications.

Gartner reports that many companies have been paying big bucks for products that have more capacity than they actually need, which the firm chalks up to a lack of architectural planning and 'the blind adoption of vendor-promoted technology.' Gartner divides application servers into two groups: low-end, which support servlets and JSPs, but typically not EJBs; and high-end, which typically support EJBs and Java messaging, and handle large transaction volumes.

This high-end/low-end distinction was what I was trying to sort out in Chicago a few months ago, trying to establish that we aren't trying to do big transaction volumes at a district leve, but more "user-facing" stuff.

And it turns out that these guys [entity-X] have built a commerical learning management system on Zope. Doesn't look like they are educators though. The web site is generally uninformative (always a good sign...) One more thing to track down eventually.

I have, by the way, deployed our final evaluation system, and it is in use by the teachers. Thanks to the wonders of object orientation, I just added a comment attribute to the "standard" class, so anal teachers can comment on each score if they see fit, in addition to attaching comments to projects and units. This was suggested by Frank. I've been weighing requests to also allow teachers to just comment on a student's performance in a class as a whole, but Jennifer is so strenuously against it that I'm holding off.

I just undertook my first exercise in error handling, as well. Two teachers were getting errors when they were inadvertantly trying to make duplicate evaluations instead of editing the existing one. So I added a little <dtml-try><dtml-except> code to automatically compensate for that and redirect to the proper form instead of throwing up a Zope error.

I have one outstanding bug. Sometimes when teachers try to delete a standard from their template it produces a cryptic list instead of the name of the standard on the confirm page and then an error if you try to execute. I haven't tried to figure that one out yet. It works most of the time and is not very critical.

I had an idea in the shower this morning for integrating Radio into my Zope system at school. You can add a RSS feed from another Radio site to your Radio aggregator by clicking on the little coffee cup icon, which is actually a link like this (if you're setting up your feed from jepstone.net):

http://127.0.0.1:5335/system/pages/subscriptions?url=http://www.jepstone.net/radio/rss.xml

This sends you to your local subscription page with the http address already entered in the field for the url variable. Simple enough. I want to allow teachers to automatically generate categories for classes or projects. This would allow the Radio input interface to be used to enter assignments and other news relevant to a specific course or unit (one sub-question is whether or not assignments should be strongly typed, compared to other news about a course--I think not, because you don't necessarily want to do extra work just to de-contextualize assignment information).

For example, once teachers have filled out the form to create a class object, the view method on the object could include a link to a url that looked like this:

http://127.0.0.1:5335/system/pages/editCategory?displayName=CreativeWriting

Except that it doesn't work. It doesn't put CreativeWriting into the displayName field (that seems to be the name of the relevant field, from looking at the page source). The advantage of this is that it starts to make Radio the single interface where teachers can add lots of different kinds of content, just by choosing the relevant categories. Ultimately, you should also be able to use XML-RPC to send these posts directly into the ZODB, to keep them associated with the course objects.

This is almost really useful for school, except we have our yahoogroup password protected, so I won't work. Still, it is good to know. Plus we're going to be running our list locally soon, so I'll have to think about how rss with that might work. Perhaps it is ok to make the subject line public but not the messages themselves.

I don't seem to be able to get it to work, anyhow. I seem to get blank documents. Is that because there have been no posts recently?

OK, it works now, but I still can't see the XML in IE.

Yahoo groups in your news aggregator.

Somehow I had totally missed this feature of Yahoo Groups. In the case that somebody else might have missed it too, if you submit:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Group_name/messages?rss=1

to your aggregator, you will get all posts submitted to that group in your favourite news reader.

Just subscribed to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/klogs/messages?rss=1 and it works perfectly. Getting rid of more mail! [from Paolo]

from It's Getting Better:

Just for giggles, I put together the Zope Python Script you see at the end of this post. I put it in the root of my Zope installation, and named it "as.opml".

It renders the current Zope level in opml in a way that will allow you to drill down into the Zope structure in a Radio outline.

Perhaps not the same as the World Outline, but interesting for the possibilities.

I used already existing Radio node types, so there should be nothing needed to install on the Radio side. You just need to drop the script into your Zope root.

To bootstrap the process, you need to save the output of "http://yourZopeRoot/as.opml" into a file (with the .opml extension) which you can then open up in Radio. Then you can traverse your Zope site to your heart's content.

Note -- it doesn't do any editing, nor does it display the contents of any Zope objects. That is left as an exercise for the reader.

You'll have to follow the link to get the script. It worked nicely for me, once I took out a couple of inappropriate line breaks.

Despite the fact that I have all five of the books on Zope, not to mention access to all the online resources, I'm still slipping into a documentation void. Specifically, I want to write a Python script to create ZClass instances. It seems like a common need, but I can't find an clear example and the syntax in far from transparent to a Python novice. So it looks like I'm stuck trying to work my way out of this hole with dtml. At some point I need to lock myself in a cave for two weeks and learn to use Python and Zope Page Templates and drop this cheezy ZClass/DTML shit.

It appears that this new Zope product, Artemis allows the same kind of WYSIWYG editing in a browser that "Radio" uses. On the other hand, the demonstration site looks rather wack, so I'll have a hard time mustering the interest in trying it out.

Rolled out the semester evaluation system, or at least the templating part of it. The teachers found it to be reasonably easy to use. I just have to finish the thorny bit to add the completed evaluation instances into the student folders. If I don't use one big form for the class/project/standards all at once it gets really twisted for the user. But the one big form requires me to create a three level hierarchy of objects with one form action, which is a trick.