Grok News and Blog

German Python Book features chapter about Grok

juh — 2008-06-26T08:40:20Z

A Python book for staff and students of 170 german universities presents grok as an example of a real world, professional Python project. The other presented projects are Plone and MoinMoin.

The book is part of a well known series in Germany (the RRZN-Handbücher), which is only available for staff and students of universities. It was written by several members of the Python User Group of Cologne (PyCologne). The chapter about Grok was written by Grok contributor Uli Fouquet.

The main authors of the book were Patrick Holz from the university of Cologne and Christopher Arndt.

Grok 0.13 is released!

faassen — 2008-06-23T20:01:32Z

The Grok team is happy to announce the release of Grok 0.13, a new feature release of Grok.

The new Grok 0.13 is a major new feature release. It contains some large restructurings, a range of new features and bug fixes. For more about it Grok 0.13, read the release announcement. It also marks the first release that uses the new grokcore.component library, which can also be used independently in other Zope 3 applications, as well as in Zope 2.

Grok 0.12.1 released!

jw — 2008-05-31T18:29:07Z

The Grok team is happy to announce the release of Grok 0.12.1! This is a bugfix release.

Grok is a web application framework built with Zope 3 technologies that aims to be easy to use.

Bug fixes:

Fix https://bugs.launchpad.net/grok/+bug/231106: Use the viewletmanager.sort() method for sorting viewlets by using util.sort_components().
grok.REST views now have a properly set __parent__ attribute and will correctly allow acquisition from parent objects, as it's used by the security policy for acquiring local grants, for example.
Fix https://bugs.launchpad.net/grok/+bug/229677: zope.app.securitypolicy egg missing. Now zope.app.securitypolicy 3.4.6 is additionally required by Grok and fetched by buildout.
The grokkers for adapters and global utilities did not use the correct value for the provided interface in the configuration action discriminator. Because of this, uninformative and potentially wrong conflict errors would occur, as well as no conflict where a conflict should have occurred.
The grokker for the global_utility() directive did immediate registrations instead of generating configuration actions. Therefore it did not provoke ConflictErrors for conflicting registrations.
Removed quickly hacked testsetup code from grok.testing.
Port fix of zope.formlib to correctly adapt the context to a FormField's interface, not the field.

Grok 0.12 released!

faassen — 2008-04-22T16:31:08Z

The Grok team is happy to announce the release of Grok 0.12, a new feature release of Grok.

The new Grok 0.12 release contains two major new features:

Viewlet support. Viewlets are highly configurable "part-of-page" components. Expect documentation on the website soon.
automatic inclusion of dependencies. No more editing configure.zcml of your application when you add a new dependency to setup.py that has ZCML configuration. Grok now automatically should find this dependency and loads its ZCML configuration, so only editing setup.py and running bin/buildout should now be required.

Note also that the Base postfix feature has been removed. Classes with names that end with this postfix are not treated as Grok base classes anymore. Use the grok.baseclass directive instead.

We recommend that everybody update grokproject first:

$ easy_install -U grokproject

This will make new projects use the new auto-inclusion facility that now ships with Grok as well. See the upgrade notes for more details on how to upgrade your current projects to Grok 0.12:

http://grok.zope.org/project/upgrade-notes

Grok at trade shows: pictorial evidence

faassen — 2008-03-17T12:46:38Z

Grok was present at CeBIT and the Chemnitzer Linux Tage earlier this month

Here are some pictures of Grok's presence.

There is some damning evidence of Grok meeting with stone-age girls.

Grokkerdam sprint!

faassen — 2008-03-11T19:44:41Z

It was planned for a long time, but at last we are going to hold a Grok sprint in the Netherlands. To be more precise, in Rotterdam. Rotterdam will be "Grokkerdam" for the duration of the sprint!

Where: Rotterdam, the Netherlands

When: 30 april - 5 may 2008

Who: hopefully, you!

http://wiki.zope.org/grok/GrokkerdamSprint

If you have any comments or questions, please mail Martijn Faassen at faassen@startifact.com.

Our generous host for this sprint is The Health Agency (http://www.thehealthagency.com/), a company that uses Grok for its own web applications here in Rotterdam.

Note: this sprint is back-to-back with the Plone 3 sprint in Paris (25-27 april), hosted by Ingeniweb. Rotterdam is 3 hours away from Paris by train. You could participate in both sprints and enjoy a few days of Paris (or Rotterdam) in between.

Grok in the Google Summer of Code: mentor hunt!

faassen — 2008-03-03T17:09:36Z

Grok needs mentors for the Summer of Code!

We are quickly approaching the Google of Summer of code again. The Zope Foundation's application needs to be in soon.

In order to do a good application, we need to have a good selection of mentors. So, if you're a Grok developer and you want to mentor a student this summer, please add yourself to the list here:

http://wiki.zope.org/gsoc/SummerOfCode2008

Don't wait: the Zope Foundation's application needs to be in very soon (by the 11th of march). The more mentors we have the better a chance we stand in getting projects accepted.

Being a mentor isn't difficult and it can be very rewarding. I was very happy to see our two Grok students (Uli and Luciano) so active in our community: they are great additions to our project. We do expect mentors to stay in regular touch with their students. This means email and normal involvement on project mailing lists, but also in addition to this a weekly hour or so on irc and/or voice. We also have a few simple reporting requirements so that your mentor coordinator (Martijn Faassen) knows what's up and can solve any potential problems.

Everybody (including mentors, students and others):

suggest projects, also on the same wiki page
suggest mentors. Tell people who you want to be mentors to sign up. Everybody likes to be told they can be mentors, so tell them in public and get them to sign up.

Students:

Mark the sign-up period on your calendar: it starts march 24. If we get accepted, then is the time to sign up.

megrok.form released!

faassen — 2008-02-26T20:23:22Z

Dirceu Pereira Tiegs has released megrok.form, an extension library that adds a lot of useful fields and widgets to Grok.

megrok.form is a helper package that provides some useful fields, widgets and constraints for Grok.

Fields

Email, a TextLine field with a default contraint
HTML, a Text field that uses z3c.widget.tiny
File, from collective.namedfile
Image, from collective.namedfile

Widgets

megrok.form overrides the default widgets for:

zope.interface.schema.Date (using zc.datetimewidget.widget.DateWidget)
zope.interface.schema.Datetime (using zc.datetimewidget.widget.DatetimeWidget)

And adds new widgets for Image and File (from collective.namedfile).

Validators/constraints

megrok.form adds constraints for:

SSN
US Phone Numbers
International Phone Numbers
Zip Code
URL
Email

You can add these to your application by listing 'megrok.form' as a dependency in your project's setup.py file and adding a <include package="megrok.form" /> to your project's configure.zcml. See the make use of add-ons tutorial for more information.

If you want to help out with the code and add more useful fields and widgets, it is available at http://svn.zope.org/megrok.form, and you can check it out using svn+ssh://svn.zope.org/repos/main/megrok.form/trunk. Let us know what you're thinking about on grok-dev and have fun!

Grok at the Snow Sprint: a report

faassen — 2008-02-26T20:12:57Z

Grok was a popular topic at the Snow Sprint, high up on the mountains. Martijn Faassen reports on what we were up to at the sprint and how it benefits Grok.

Grok web site relaunch

kteague — 2008-02-22T01:58:49Z

The Grok web site has been reworked and relaunched.

The Grok web site has been given a new look and feel. It is now powered by the Plone Content Management System. This provides the Grok web site with an always up-to-date site search, RSS feeds of site news, documentation updates and all site content updates. Most importantly, the Grok Documentation area now allows you to create an account with the web site and contribute structured documentation.

Contributors

Kevin Teague stepped up to be the official cat herder and dotter of i's for the site relaunch. Armin C. Stroß-Radschinski created an official Grok logo for the project as well as a stylized version of the Grok character. Sebastian Ware provided the intial site redesign, while the Grok web team at the Neanderthal 2007 sprint lead by Martijn Faassen used this to created the initial Plone theme and content. Uli Fouquet extended restructured-text support for the site to include additional directives as well as syntax highlighting and line numbers. Finally Martijn Faassen poked people to keep the project moving.

Grok 0.11.1 released

kteague — 2008-01-21T02:16:52Z

First maintenance release of the 0.11 series.

Grok 0.11.1 release manager Jan-Wijbrand Kolman is happy to announce the 0.11.1 release of Grok!

This release is available on PyPI and a new index of specific versions of packages used by this release has been frozen at http://grok.zope.org/releaseinfo/grok-0.11.1.cfg. This means that new projects created with grokproject will start using this release right away.

This is maintenance only release that just contains bug fixes and does not introduce any new features.

Upgrading

To upgrade an existing project from 0.11 to 0.11.1 you have to:

change the 'extends' directive in your project's buildout.cfg to point to http://grok.zope.org/releaseinfo/grok-0.11.1.cfg

run bin/buildout in your project, to update the dependencies including the 0.11.1 egg of Grok itself

Bug fixes

Do not register the publishTraverse and browserDefault methods of the JSON component as views.
Methods with names that start with an '_' are not registered as views for XMLRPC, REST and JSON components.
Use a configuration action for the registration of the static directory.
Fix https://bugs.launchpad.net/grok/+bug/161948: grok.testing.grok() now also loads the ZPT template factories so that unit tests that need to configure views with ZPT templates continue to work.
Changed a few remaining references to grok.grok and grok.grok_component to their correct equivalents in grok.testing.
grok.testing.grok_component() could not be used in a pure doctest. This needed a bugfix in Martian (since 0.9.2). Add a test that demonstrates this problem.
Fix https://bugs.launchpad.net/grok/+bug/162437: grok.Form and its subclasses did not implement IBrowserView.

Snow Sprint 2008 Grok presentation

kteague — 2008-01-21T04:39:26Z

Martijn Faassen gives a talk about Grok at the 2008 Snow Sprint.

Snow Sprint 2008 is taking place from January 18th to 25th, 2008 in Berghof Piz Buin, Austria. This is a gathering of 50 Zope developers who have come together to hack on all things Zope related. The focus this year is on Zope 3 and high traffic related topics.

Martijn Faassen was in attendance and give a Grok from a Zope 3 perspective focused talk at the sprint, which was recorded and made available online by Christian Scholz, multimedia chronicler of all things Zope, as a broadcast of the MrTopf Show.

Note that the video may be a bit choppy right near the start of the video, butit should stream fine for the bulk of the presentation.

Grok 0.11 released

kteague — 2008-01-31T23:07:40Z

The Grok team is happy to announce the release of Grok 0.11!

Grok is a web application framework built with Zope 3 technologies that aims to be easy to use.

Grok 0.11 is a feature release of Grok, introducing important new features:

Layers and skinning support. It is now easy to place views in layers, and to define skins so that these layers can be browsed.
REST support. There is an easy way to create RESTful web services with Grok now. Create special REST protocols that support GET, POST, PUT and DELETE. See the REST Tutorial for more information.
pluggable template languages. Besides the built-in support for Zope Page Templates, Grok now allows you to plug in other template languages as well. See http://grok.zope.org/minitutorials/template-languages.html for instructions on how to integrate a template language into Grok. We are planning on releasing a Genshi plugin for Grok next week.
Improved permission and role support. See the Permissions Tutorial for more information. If you were already using these in your existing Grok code you need to change your code a bit. The upgrade notes contain more information about these changes.

One important change is rather hidden from view so bears a bit of explanation. Grok is based on Zope 3. Grok could always reuse Zope 3 libraries without problems. The other way around wasn't so nice however: Zope 3-based code could not use Grok-based code so easily, as Grok would not emit configuration actions. Grok 0.11 now does emit such configuration actions and this is a major step on the way towards backwards compatibility with Zope 3. If you have custom Grokkers in your code, you probably have to change them: please see the upgrade notes for information how to upgrade these.

For the detailed changelog, see Grok's PyPI entry page.

For upgrade notes, including how to change your application, see http://grok.zope.org/upgrade.html

For installation instructions and much more on how to use Grok, see the Grok tutorial: http://grok.zope.org/tutorial.html

If you enjoy Grok, please subscribe to the grok-dev mailing list and join us in the #grok channel on irc.freenode.net.

We hope to see you there!

Grok 0.10.2 released

kteague — 2008-01-21T01:42:15Z

Maintenance release for the 0.10 series

To upgrade an existing project from 0.10.1 to 0.10.2 you have to:

change the 'extends' directive in your project's buildout.cfg to point to http://grok.zope.org/releaseinfo/grok-0.10.2.cfg
run bin/buildout in your project, to update the dependencies including the 0.10.2 egg of Grok itself

Grok 0.10.1 released

kteague — 2008-01-21T01:43:02Z

Maintenance release of the 0.10 series

Grok 0.10.1 is a bugfix release of Grok, and the first outcome of the Neanderthal Grok sprint that was hosted by GfU Cyrus in Cologne, Germany, last week.

The sole aim of this release is to fix Grok's installation story. Releases of Zope 3 components that Grok relied on had the tendency to break Grok. Since Grok now uses a fixed list of versions it relies on, this problem should now be solved. The grokproject tool has also been updated to 0.6, and now automatically uses the version list feature.

To update grokproject to 0.6, please type the following:

$ easy_install -U grokproject

For more information about this release, including instructions on how to update existing buildouts to use the version list feature, see here: http://grok.zope.org/releaseinfo/readme.html