Shane Hathaway on February 19th, 2009

I’m starting to get a sense of what publisher functionality I can put in a WSGI pipeline and what I shouldn’t. The pipeline is very useful for specifying the order things should happen.  For example, the error handling should be as early in the pipeline as possible, so it can handle many kinds of errors, [...]

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Shane Hathaway on February 17th, 2009

I like to believe that I am a competent software developer in both Python and Java.  As a competent developer, I find that certain things are generally much easier than other things. For instance, I just spent a frustrating week working out how to install a Shibboleth identity provider, yet I never got it working [...]

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Shane Hathaway on February 13th, 2009

That error means a Java regular expression did not match the input text. If you get this while trying to install Shibboleth, it’s because the installer requires a host name with three parts, such as “shib.example.com”.  “localhost” and “localhost.localdomain” will not suffice.

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Shane Hathaway on February 12th, 2009

I’ve been working on a new revision of the Zope publishing framework.  The goal is to make the publisher comprehensible.  Since I helped design the current publisher, I don’t mind saying that the current design really stinks.  We made it extensible in a way that breeds ravioli code.  I find it difficult to follow the [...]

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Shane Hathaway on February 9th, 2009

Here are my current thoughts on what we should do with zope.publisher. Most packages that depend on zope.publisher only use its interfaces and two base classes (BrowserView and BrowserPage).  Those packages don’t care about anything else that zope.publisher offers.  Therefore, to reduce dependency burdens and to make the zope.publisher package easier to explain, I think [...]

Continue reading about Redesign of zope.publisher

Shane Hathaway on February 4th, 2009

Back in 2002-2004, I was part of the team that redesigned a lot of code for Zope 3.  The publisher was one of the first things we redesigned.  While I’m sure ZPublisher started out pretty clean when it was first coded, over the years it had grown massive special cases and odd dependencies.  For Zope [...]

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