Zope Foundation in the Google Summer of Code

Zope Foundation in the Google Summer of Code

The Zope Foundation is very happy to announce it has five projects accepted by the Google Summer of Code. Thank you Google! In this article, I will introduce the projects, students and mentors.

Zope2 on Python2.5

student: ranjith babu kannikara

mentor: Sidnei da Silva

This project is a followup of the Zope 3 on Python 2.5 project that was successfully completed in last year's summer of code by another student from the same school, Nikhil N. It's safe to say this project is considered essential by everyone in our community.

Nikhil N already explored some of this porting project and Ranjith communicated with him about it, so we're off to a good start. Sidnei, the mentor, is very experienced in all things Zope and has been in our community for many years. He is also a long-standing contributor to Plone, the popular Zope-based CMS, and which should help make sure that Plone works on the Python 2.5 version of Zope as well.

http://code.google.com/soc/2008/zope/appinfo.html?csaid=3F42269E3CDF31BD

Improved replication for ZODB through ZEO Raid

student: Dirceu Pereira Tiegs

mentor: Christian Theune

ZEO Raid is an approach to eliminating the single point of failure that clustered ZODB projects traditionally have: the single ZEO server. ZEO Raid introduces a redundant array of these servers. Doing this should expand the scalability and robustness of Zope's powerful transactional object database technology further.

I know Dirceu already as he has been active in the Grok community. He wrote the great megrok.form library for Grok. Mentor Christian Theune is the original developer of ZEO Raid. He has been a very active member of the Zope community for many years, contributing to Zope 2, Zope 3, Plone, the ZODB, the German Zope User Group DZUG, and helping to found the Grok project, and much more.

http://code.google.com/soc/2008/zope/appinfo.html?csaid=480505ACAC256B7D

Flint: a simple Grok-based CMS

student: Luciano Ramalho

mentor: Leonardo Rochael Almeida

The Flint project aims to create a lightweight CMS based on the Grok web application framework. The idea is also to learn from this project to feed features and documentation back into Grok. I hope that besides an separately installable CMS, this project will also result in the development of some CRUD UI layers that can be easily be integrated into any Grok application.

Luciano is participating the second time as a student for the Zope Foundation. I had the pleasure of mentoring him last year in another Grok-related project. He continued to contribute to Grok after the conclusion of the summer of code project, and I had the great fortune of being able to meet him in person at the Neanderthal sprint at the offices of GfU Cyrus AG in Cologne last fall. This year he will be mentored by Leonardo Rochael Almeida, who is a contributor to Zope 2 and Zope 3, and an active participant in the Grok community. They know each other in person, so Leonardo can go over with a club to Luciano's house to keep him in check.

http://code.google.com/soc/2008/zope/appinfo.html?csaid=3B4AE1B198100838

OCQL a Query Language for ZODB (Phase 0)

Student: Charith Lakshitha Paranaliyanage

Mentor: Ádám Gröszer

This ambitious project will aim to add an object query language to the Zope object database. The ZODB is great as you can just store Python objects. Relational databases are great as you can just query everything. For the ZODB this is a bit more involved, and you're required to set up an index. Adding an object query language to the ZODB would help us get closer to the ease of querying a relational database for a database of Python objects.

Charith responded well in the application phase and wrote a good proposal. Zope 3 contributor and mentor Ádám was thorough in testing this prospective student by asking him to write code. Ádám already helped start a project to implement this earlier on and has looked up relevant academic papers, so we're off to a good start here. As someone with an occasional interest in such things I'm quite excited by this project and look forward to following it.

http://code.google.com/soc/2008/zope/appinfo.html?csaid=D03B177E4CFF8E51

Grok: Introspector

Student: Uli Fouquet

Mentor: Martijn Faassen (me!)

The Grok introspector project was begun by Uli in last year's summer of code, and since then we have gained experience and we have some new ideas. There is more to do: the component architecture lets us introspect all kinds of object associations that we don't display yet in the UI. In addition, it'd be good if we displayed what Grok directives were used in the introspector UI as well. We will develop a new package, tentatively named zope.introspector that will provide a common infrastructure for introspecor facilities. In this project we will work together with Martin Lundwall, who is going to work on a related project for the Plone Foundation, more about which I'll say below.

Student Uli contributed crucial introspector infrastructure to Grok in last year's summer of code. I also had the pleasure of getting to know Uli in person at a number of sprints and conferences last year. Last year his mentor was Philipp von Weitershausen, but this year I'll have the pleasure of mentoring him myself.

http://code.google.com/soc/2008/zope/appinfo.html?csaid=67681C063AA1A4BF

Wait! Extra bonus projects!

Our sister foundation the Plone Foundation also applied to the Google Summer of Code, and some of the work done there will surely flow back into Zope. Here is the list of their accepted five projects:

http://code.google.com/soc/2008/plone/about.html

I'd like to highlight two in particular:

Component Registry Introspector

Student: Martin Lundwall

Mentor: Lennart Regebro

Since there is a lot of commonality with the Grok inspector, during the proposal period Martin and Uli already started talking about joining forces. They will work together on zope.introspector, where Martin will focus on Plone integration and Uli will focus on Grok integration. Mentor Lennart Regebro is also a long-standing contributor in the Zope community. He's someone I've worked with in the past, and I'm very happy I'll be able to do so again for this project.

http://code.google.com/soc/2008/plone/appinfo.html?csaid=9772C1C3ABD45432

Buildout Builder - An automated buildout configuration system

Student: Kenneth Miller

Mentor: Raphael Ritz

This is another project to watch: a system to help buildout configurations is of benefit to all of us that use buildout, and moreover, a more personal interest: this system will be developed using Grok!

http://code.google.com/soc/2008/plone/appinfo.html?csaid=69983137B55A28A5

Another bonus project!

That doesn't conclude the bonus projects. There's another project, this time one hosted by the Python Software Foundation, that is of great relevance to Zope:

Improvement of Zope support on Jython

Student: Georgy Berdyshev

Mentor: Frank Joseph Wierzbicki

Zope Foundation backup mentor: Sidnei da Silva

The immediate goal is to port essential core Zope libraries to the Jython platform, with an eye on making something like Zope 3 and Grok run in Jython. Adjustements to the Zope libraries will be fed back to Zope; some C extensions will be rewritten in Python where this hasn't happened already.

Jython will gain a bunch of powerful libraries, and a lot of feedback on what is involved in porting a complicated Python framework to Jython.

For the Zope side, the hope is that in future you'd be able to deploy, say, your Grok application, on the Jython platform. This means we'd also have full access to the many java libraries. Another side effect is that this project would make it easier to port these libraries to other Python interpreter platforms as well. I wrote more about this here.

Mentor Frank Wierzbicki is project lead of the Jython project, recently hired by Sun to work full time on Jython. He is the best mentor we could possibly ask for this project.

It's safe to say the Zope community needs to back this up. Sidnei offered to be backup mentor for this project. Since he's already mentoring the Python 2.5 porting project, he is in a great position to offer useful insights in the Jython porting project as well. Sidnei's also well connected in the Zope community and knows the people to ask for help when needed. So Zope community members, if he, Frank or Georgy asks for your help, please help!

http://code.google.com/soc/2008/psf/appinfo.html?csaid=59C7870763174C10