Archive for June, 2005

Jean-Marc's slides for his Europython 2005 talk are now
online.

One great thing about his talk is that he's come up with a "Top 10 reasons
to use CPSSkins" which are:

• 10. modify your site design without restarting the server
• 9. cache page fragments without setting up a Squid
• 8. create a design that works on all CSS2-compliant browsers
• 7. do tableless design without spending hours on it
• 6. respect Web standards without reading the W3 specs
• 5. create visual variation across your site
• 4. prevent content creators from altering the site's design
• 3. allow content creators to be more creative, but not too much
• 2. focus on form and content and not just on technique
• 1. don't reinvent the wheel, spend time on real development

One can read more background information about CPSSkins in Jean-Marc's
last year talk (but this was before the introduction of portlets into
the … Read more

My slides are now online.

I tried to give a rather technical talk, by emphasising the innovative
aspects of CPS (repository, proxies, workflows, shemas, documents,
directories…).

It was still an introduction however, more technical details can be found
in Julien's (CPSPortlets: architecture overview,
CPS3/Z3ECM: from stateful to activity-based workflow), Florent's (Versioning and relation management in a Zope ECM), Tarek's  (CPSMailAcces: a webmail for CPS3) and Jean-Marc's (CPSSkins) talks this year, as
well as Julien's
talks last year.

The Economic Majority
(against software patents) webstite now has more than 1500 supporters which
is already a fair number, but could use even more support before the
software patents directive get voted by the European Parliament next
week.

There are also many more
testimonies than last time I checked.

Unfortunately, some MEPs, like Mr Edward McMillan-Scott
(brittish, conservative, vice-president of the Parliament) don't seem to get
it, and still believe that software patents will protect the small business
against the big corporations (they don't seem to have read a single line of
all the economic litterature that has been written on the subject, and
certainly not listened to the real entrepreneurs out there).

Here is a non-exhaustive list of what people have been doing during the
sprint, as was reported during the sprint wrapup:

Jean-Marc Orliaguet: has ported (in fact totally rewrote) CPSSkins for Zope3. The
"main content area" (the place where the current document or folder is
displayed) is now a portlet like all the other portlets.

Ph. von Weitershausen: we need a common vocabulary for portlets,
pagelets, whatever. Otherwise it gets confusing.

Tres Seavers: has worked on the pipeline machinery.
The point is to be able to define series of transformations that apply to an
input. A pipeline is a list of callable objects. For example, a pipeline
that converts an XML document to a DOM, then does something to the DOM like
adding some elements, then converts it back to a string. The code for
pipeline itself is not very interesting.

Tarek Ziadé / Godefroid Chappelle: AJAX … Read more

Here are some stats about the laptops used by the zope sprinters in
Europython:

• 13 Apple notebooks (all of them 15'' Titanium btw)
• 5 Dell notebooks
• 1 IBM X40 subnotebook
• 1 ASUS S5 subnotebook (mine )
• 2 no-name notebooks (MITAC)

All the non-Apple notebooks seem to be running some variant of Linux (no
Windows in sight).

Some of the titanium seem brand new, and all their owners seem to be proud
of using the "world's most
advanced obsolete computer"

I'm at the Z3ECM sprint in EuroPython 2005 and I've spent yesterday trying
to play with the JCR
(Java Content Repository aka JSR-170) trying to understand

1. how easy it would be to how a Zope content management system into a JCR
   (short answer: not easy – despite of claims of interoperability, JCR is a
   100% Java technology).
2. if there are useful ideas in the JCR that could be put into the design
   of the repository for Z3ECM (short answer: probably, yes)

Hooking Zope into a JCR

After installing Jackrabbit (an open
source implementation of the JCR made by the Apache project) and testing it
with some Java examples, I've trying calling it from Python using the JPype Java<->Python
bridge.

Installing Jackrabbit is not that hard, it took me about one hour though
since I haven't done any Java development since 1996 and didn't have all the
right tools (including Maven … Read more

I did a presentation yesterday at the ObjectWeb consortium architect seminar
about "Python for middleware scripting" (trying to push Python to a Java
crowd – not that easy). The
slides are available (PDF, 800 kb). If you have comments on the slides
(which were written in a bit of a hurry without the time to check all the
information), I'd be glad to hear from you (-> sf@nuxeo.com).

Here is a message I just got from FFII regarding the upcoming vote on
software patents in the European Parliament.

If the Directive is adopted in second reading by the Parliament, it would
mean a tremendous blow to the european IT SMEs (and probably also some of
the major players too) as well as for free / open source software projects who will have to
sustain in the near future vicious attacks from our american competitors
(and probably some others).

It seems there is still a little hope left, so we'd better not lose the
last chances we have to change to course of the european IT history. It's
time to act now.

Here is the mail:

Dear Stefane Fermigier, CEO, Nuxeo,

1) The vote in the Second Reading on the software patent directive is in
11-13 work days, on 5-7 July.

2) Lobbying in Brussels is heavy, currently there

… Read more

Ca fait toujours plaisir

Le gouvernement sénégalais s'équipe librement d'un intranet (JDNet
Solutions, 8 juin 2005).

Du coup on a commencé à rédiger une étude de
cas sur le site nuxeo.com.

Vu sur le site de XTech 2005, une présentation (slides PDF – texte
html) très intéressante sur le format OASIS OpenDocument (anciennement
connu sous le nom de Open Office XML), autrement dit le futur format
standard d'OpenOffice.org 2.0.

Il y a sans doute des informations utiles pour une nouvelle mise à jour du
livre blanc Indesko OpenOffice.org:
l'avantage XML.