My Year at Zest

I made a report for school, about what I did the past year (well, about nine months) at Zest Software. You can download the report (pdf). Read on for the preface and abstract of the report.

Preface

This report spans the period of May 2006 till January 2007. During that time, I was working for Zest Software in Hoogvliet, The Netherlands. This was part of the "dual route" of my study Informatics at the Rotterdam Institute for Informatics Studies (RIVIO) of the Hogeschool Rotterdam. I worked four days a week for Zest, and studied on Fridays.

Zest Software is a Plone company, so my work there is mostly in Plone and in Zope and Python as underlying technologies. But other subjects pop to the surface from time to time, like subversion, LDAP and Linux administration in general.

The main goal of writing this report is to convince Hans Manni from the Hogeschool Rotterdam that I learned a lot and worked hard these past months at Zest Software and that I should receive a good number of study points. But I like to give some extra zest to this report by making it relevant for a bigger audience, specifically Plone developers. I will therefore focus on three subjects that I think give a broad overview of what I have been doing and are also interesting to the general Plone community.

Just like in my last report, I can say that I have learned and laughed a lot at Zest Software and I thank my colleagues for that. I look forward to working on my final study assignment with them.

Abstract

After the introduction, the first subject is subversion. Importing your product in the collective shows how to move the code of your product from your own subversion repository to the Plone collective (or any other repository) including all the history.

In ldapconfig: connecting Plone and LDAP we take on a subject that is always good for a lot of questions on Plone mailing lists. Connecting with LDAP (or Microsoft Active Directory) is certainly doable, but there are some gotchas. To make it easier for us and for Plone developers in general to get this to work, we made ldapconfig, a product that tries to reduce the complexity of this subject to a relatively simple configuration file. This product is presented in the third chapter.

Last but not least is a tutorial on Zope 3 technologies: Embrace and Extend: The Zope 3 Way. Slowly but surely Zope 2 is being replaced by the newer and cleaner Zope 3. This makes it possible to extend existing Zope (or Plone) products in a very clean, non-intrusive way, that is future-proof.

By personal convention and as service to the reader, I have included the most important files that I created for this report itself in the appendices.