So I wonder now how I ever got into wondering whether I should attend or not. This being my first snow sprint (because always something was in the way before) it was definitely a great thing to attend and I am surely there again next year. So thanks to Jodok for convincing me to come in order to work on a joined Second Life project we and Lovely Systems are doing.
So you out there might be wondering what has happened at the sprint and I agree that we all need to do more blogging, esp. every sprint group as they know best what they have been up to. I will definitely try to encourage people at the next sprints I attend to do that. I personally wasn’t doing that much video this time as I finally also wanted to code something again and try to use the time to get up to the recent developments. And there are many. So what did I do? Here’s the list:
- working on that Second Life project and creating a HTTP backend for it (soon more about this once it’s finished). This was done together with Jürgen Kartnaller of Lovely Systems.
As part of this I checked out pyaws (the amazon ecommerce lib) and decided that it could have a nicer and more rich interface ;-) - attending the Grok tutorial of Philipp von Weitershausen and filming the presentation (times are busy again with client stuff so no deadline yet for the release of it).
- finally checking out Plone3 and wondering why the hell it is so unusable slow. I found some misconfiguration in my browser as the caching was still disabled but the setting somehow gone from the Preferences. I managed to fix it via about:config (maybe some idea for Zope/Plone in having this way of configuration and just revealing a small subset of it in a proper UI while still preserving all the flexibility).
- implementing a Tags portlet and viewlet in order to get used to Plone 3 and especially KSS. What it does is displaying the Subject/Keywords as a viewlet and a portlet on the page and allowing in-place editing of these tags (delete and add). On my way back me and Godefroid also thought about the needed event handling for that in order for these items to be in sync. A portlet refresh with portlet hash etc. is not working here as I don’t know the hash when I am in the event which might be triggered by the viewlet. Eventually we need a better event handling here where each portlet or viewlet manager informs it’s viewlets as only the manager knows which one are where displayed. OTOH this will make everything again slower.
- doing some performance tests because of my initial problems with FireBug. Unfortunately the results were not really saying that much. I guess I have to redo that in a more structured way. As part of this I was discussing with Balazs what the ResourceRegistry is eventually doing wrong (e.g. in not sending the right headers) and how it might be fixed. We agreed to talk to Florian about it but before that I would like to have better numbers and analysis.
So this was more or less what I did. Here’s what others did, without any status though:
- Stefan Holek and Sasha Vincic have been working on REST integration into Zope 3 and from what I know they also got quite far (please add the Zope 3 link to the wikipedia entry when finished!). See also the „wiki page“:
- Balazs Ree was working with changing people on making KSS better and e.g. adding more drag’n’drop Support (Tom Lazar was helping there a bit).
- Godefroid Chapelle was working on creating tests for KSS as it needs a lot of cross-browser tests in order to do refactoring more easily and being sure that it still works on all the browsers and operating systems afterwards. He used buildbot for achieving this and PIK Potsdam was sponsoring a server for this. Buildbot is used to automatically build the application on the remote end and Selenium RC for remotely running the tests. I did a video with a screencast about it and I hope to put it online soon.
- Spanky was leading the Calendaring group where they were trying to get all the existing calendaring products under one roof and eventually factor out common stuff such as the views so they can be reused by all the products. Their results was e.g. to create the dateable bundle which installs all the parts you need. Helpful was also to have Lennart Regebro there who knows quite a lot about Calendaring in CPS of which CalCore is used in dateable.
- Some people (I think Jürgen was part of that) were working on creating a caching mechanism for Views and Viewlets in Zope3. According to them speedups in the 100s are possible IIRC. Unfortunately I don’t know any URL to that.
- Another group around Manfred Schwendiger was doing a Zope 3 tutorial to learn all the concepts and modules of Zope 3.
- Jodok was telling me that he was working on some
mod_pythonstuff which would enable „ESI for the poor“ as the Squid guys weren’t able to fix some specific bug in their ESI implementation (for those who don’t know what ESI is: It enables you to add markup to your page which tells Squid which parts should be cached in which way). He wanted to give me an interviews but we didn’t manage to do it in time as some sledging was suddenly going on ;-) - Nate Aune and co have been working on Multimedia. On the audio front they added a popup player, a search catalog for mp3s, a play button for audio file listings. On the video front they started on extracting video metainformation and extending the view. See the wiki for more information.
- There has been some work on GIS integration in Plone, continuing work from the Seattle sprint. Nate has an interview on video and I hope he will post it soon :)
- Ben Saller was working for Lovely Systems on Lovely Similar, a project based on Haystack, which enables the user to find similar pages in an automatical way in a site.
- Some people have been working on getting a Zope bundle for Textmate ready. Andreas Zeidler was showing me a nice PDB integration (textmate opens up and shows the actual line when pdb is hitting a breakpoint). Tom Lazar was doing a screencast about his extension which we will post later. (PDB one needs still TBD).
That is what I remember for now. I am sure I forgot something, so feel free to add it yourself on your blog so that you can see it on the planet. If you don’t have a blog, signup at WordPress and get one for free. And don’t forget to claim your blog at Technorati.
If you want to see some more stuff, look at photos !
Thanks to Lovely Systems and all the sponsors for making this possible!