Paris Sprint very Productive

Second to last day here at the sprint, and all the teams have great news to report.  First, the big news:

Zope 2.8 will include the "Five" product, which allows Zope 2 users to start using advanced Zope 3 features right away.  Some of these features include:

• Using Zope 3 style "views" to wrap Zope 2 objects with the advanced Zope 3 skins and layer features, thus allow Zope 3 style coding techniques to be used in Zope 2.  This is much more flexible than the CMF "skins" feature.
  
• Uses Zope 3's security declaration features (declared with the Zope Configuration Markup Language, ZCML) thus never needing to use Zope 2 style security declarations in your code again (and no more InitializeClass()!)
• Use Zope 3 style utilities in Zope 2, replacing the need for things like CMF "tools" and allowing users to use more advanced Zope 3 utilities (like Zemantic, more on that below).
• Provide a clear transition path to Zope 3 for developers and users without requiring them to dump their existing Zope 2 code, which few realistic users could ever afford to do.

There may be some more details, but I haven't been spending my time working on that team, instead Tres Seaver, Tarek Zaide and I have been working on the Zemantic (http://zemantic.org/) semantic web search engine for Zope 3.  We've added quite a few cool features and new tests, and we plan on making an 0.5 release at the end of the sprint.  The best feature we've added so far is full text indexing of RDF literal string data, this is an important feature that will allow Zemantic to completely cover all the use cases of the ZCatalog.

Last, Jean-Mark has been porting his really cool CPSPortlets tool to Zope 3 (and 2.8 now that it includes FIve support).  I wish I was a UI guy and could better explain what it does, but I can tell you that the demo is very, very cool, uses Javascript and drag and drop to intuitively allow users to modify the layout of their site right there through the web, no documents to edit, no code to write, just drag the elements around and right click on them to change their properties.  I really hop this kind of technology will be included in the next Z3 CMS.

After tommorow we'll all be doing cross presentation between the teams to show off what we've done, at that time i'll have some more concrete details to report as well as links and pointers to places where others can contribute.  For now, we're gonna go out for some Thai food. ;)