On Mon, 1 Nov 1999, Patrick Hayes wrote:
> Questions about Zope?
Yes. People from the Zope crowd have raised that the Midgardians
misunderstand Zope and therefore don't appreciate it for what it
is. And there must certainly be features from Zope that are going
to be interesting to have in Midgard. Talking to someone who
has in-depth knowledge seems like a good idea to me.
> What seems ideal to me is to look at any collaborations. I would love it if
> Midgard knew how to use several programming languages (including Zope), not
> just PHPx.
Note that Zope is not a programming language, but an application server.
Zope is to Python roughly as Midgard is to PHP.
There's been talk of supporting multiple languages, and the setup of the
midgard library would make it doable (just not toworrow). I'd think Perl
would be a prime candidate.
> I suggest you ask them what options exist for doing it (and
> forward any responses to Henri, Jukka, etc.).
Excellent question, I'll be sure to talk to the speaker about it.
> Since Zope, like Midgard, is
> more a structure than just a language, what might be more appropriate is a
> wizard for converting sites to/from Zope and Midgard (or, better yet, an XML
> structure which handles both; a friend and I have created such a DTD, which
> is now very complete). It would definitely require a joint venture of some
> type.
We are *most* interested in tools for conversion. But how to handle the
scripting content? It is totally doable to build an entire Midgard site
with one active root page with a monster script to generate the entire
site. I'm not sure how one would do this in Zope, Enhydra, Locomotive,
NetObjects Fusion, AOLserver, and the proliferation of other application
servers out there.
> For a web site I'm working on (which will soon scale up to a full portal), I
> only have the option of hosting it on a server that is all Microsoft (SQL
> Server 7, ASP, etc.). Even if I hacked a version of Midgard to work under
> NT, I still probably wouldn't be allowed to use it on that site (since the
> fools have their servers running on M$ software, it's already unstable, and
> the only way to add new technology is to add a separate machine, which I
> probably wouldn't have time to administer nor the budget to buy in the first
> place). So for this particular project the ideal would be a version of
> Midgard that did its dynamic stuff through ASP, not PHP (much more likely to
> be permitted on the existing servers). Obviously that isn't going to happen
> any time soon.
I wouldn't expect it soon, no. Just for arguments sake: you *can* run
Midgard-on-Linux-on-VMware-on-NT . It's neither efficient nor
convenient, I just tried it for the hack of it.
I don't think ASP support would be the primary project for NT, either,
since PHP works with both apache-NT and IIS.
> In the meantime, a friend and I are working on an XML-based solution which
> will be able to turn Midgard-generated pages into ASP pages (to add
> security, etc.)
Interesting. Are those source pages active pages? What security is
added by moving to ASP?
> (the same DTD I mentioned earlier; it isn't specific to any
> one hosting technology). Once we have it working, it will also be able to
> target those pages to/from Zope and other similar systems.
But Zope and Midgard (and AOLserver and Enhydra and ...) aren't similar
other than in the fact that all serve, in the end, HTML. The infrastructure
is different, the security model is different, to name just a few issues.
> It will
> eventually transfer anything to anything (I hope!). The best cure for
> proprietary systems is to know how to convert a site to/from any of them.
>
> Question: how well does Midgard import and use existing HTML pages (can it,
> and how do you do it?)?
The manual you were looking at is in fact imported from the filesystem. You
can use any PHP in the pages and the styles, so it's pretty easy to
open a file and display it within the content part of the style.
> The initial cut of many pieces of my site has been
> created with NetObjects Fusion (very cool tool!), and it would be really
> handy to be able to import the existing pages into Midgard
It will import the HTML, but I believe NOF requires a scripting backend
which will not be available in Midgard.
> (and have Midgard
> add standardized buttons on the left column and the top row, current
> news/announcements, etc.).
Midgard excels at this.
> I could pull that off on my site because I could
> always have Midgard do a daily update on my home machine, post-process the
> generated pages, then upload them to the server.
That's exactly how I'll be using Midgard for a few sites.
> I honestly haven't done a
> lot of Midgard programming yet, and the documentation isn't what I would
> call complete! (the instruction on importing pages is: "TO DO") I need to
> decide soon how I'm going to do my embedding, and whether Midgard can do
> some of that for me. Any assistance and suggestions are greatly
> appreciated.
The manual needs work, true. We welcome all those willing to work on
it. If you state your specific needs on the mailinglist I'm sure
you'll get enough info to get you going.
Bye,
Emile
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