[Mailman-Developers] ZMailman 2.1 preview

[Stephan Richter]

At 05:02 PM 12/9/2001 -0800, J C Lawrence wrote:
>On Sun, 09 Dec 2001 16:34:53 -0800
>Dan Mick <dmick@utopia.West.Sun.COM> wrote:
>
> > I don't understand Zope; can someone describe why I might want
> > this, what it buys me, etc. (like a sales brochure)?
>
>Think a semi-OO based PHP setup where the OO as[ects extended not
>only to the internal language, but also to the construction of page
>elements and templates, and of course, instead of using PHP, use
>Python and much more cleanly abstracted DB interface.  Probably the
>biggest other difference is that Zope natievly works off a single
>unified store rather than the filesystem.

Yes, that is pretty good, even though comparing Zope/Python to PHP is not 
really possible.

First of all, the Python team and the Zope team work all for the same 
company Zope Corp.

Then, Zope is a Python-based Web Application Server. It uses the ZODB, an 
object-oriented DB, that stores automatically all the objects. Since 
everything is saved there, security is built in from the beginning, so you 
do not have to worry about people breaking in into objects, just because 
you forgot to set permissions or hiding a link. Zope uses many advanced 
design patterns, such as Persistence, Acquisition, Page Templates, 
Component Architectures (Zope 3.0) and so on.

If you like Python and need to do Web applications a lot, you should have a 
look at Zope (www.zope.org). It is a very nice software and does a lot of 
things for you.

Furthermore, for the Mailman 3.0 release I would like to make a case for 
using the ZODB (not the entire Zope package!) for storing our data 
structures, since we will not have to worry about file locking and data 
storage in general anymore. Furthermore, we can then easily build adapters 
for other data storages. Again, this is just a suggestion... I still have 
to read the archives and proposals some more, before I can propose a design 
for the data structures to the list.

As you might have noticed, this is really what I am interested in, because 
having tighter integrations between Web tools and Mailman, could give 
Mailman a huge boost in usage. In fact, the current ZMailman release does 
already some nice things, but it will be even better, once the data is 
stored in the ZODB. Unfortunately, the current data structures are not 
clean enough for this effort and I did not want to rewrite most of Mailman 
to make it work. ;-)

Regards,
Stephan

--
Stephan Richter
CBU - Physics and Chemistry Student
Web2k - Web Design/Development & Technical Project Management