EIONET Development Tools and Philosophy

ITTAG Meeting Athens 20th September, 2000

Søren Roug

EEA

Agenda

• • • • • • • • What is Open Source?

EIONET ’s Software Tools PHP Why Linux What is Zope Zope Products What is Zope ’s Role?

Zope in EIONET Context • • • • Creating a new announcement XML: alternative formats XML example: NATLAN2 Zope demonstration

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Open Source: Why Use It?

• • •

Code reuse

– Software created for one DEM could be used for another if we have the source

Competition

– To make it possible for other companies to make extensions to CIRCLE (or provide 3 rd level support)

Protection of investment

– In the event that the software vendor goes out of business or loses interest in the product

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EIONET's Open Source Initiative

• • •

EIONET wants to use Open Source products as much as possible ED, TietoEnator and others write software products for us

– Hence, from now on; the new products, we ask them to develop, are Open Source

We have chosen Mozilla Public License

– What does that mean?

MPL: Contracting Company ’s Rights

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• •

You may sell (for profit) EIONET-owned software to others or EIONET (e.g. bundled with service)

– But you must tell the customer, that the source is available for free (Sec 3.6)

You may combine it with proprietary software as a larger works

– But if you modify the EIONET-owned software you must make it available for free in source form

Some Business As Usual

• • •

We will still ask a company to do QA testing and product support Will we have different incompatible versions of CIRCA?

– No, CIRCA is not (yet) Open Source and if it was, the Mozilla License will prevent it. That’s why we chose MPL

*Much* more emphasis on design documentation EEA

EIONETS Software Tools

• • • • • • • •

Philosophy: Open Source Webserver: Apache Content Management: Zope Rapid development: PHP Operating Systems: Linux, Commercial UNIX Groupware system: CIRCA Data formats: XML Database system: MySQL EEA

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PHP

• • • •

PHP is a language to make HTML-documents more interactive You program directly in the HTML document EEA use it for the THEMES database and WASTEBASE PHP is also Open Source software

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Why Linux

• • •

Linux is as stable as commercial UNIXes Our biggest Solaris Server is 2 x 480 MHz CPUs

– Our next Linux will be Intel-based 1.100 MHz – Much cheaper

You can install a development system on an old PC

LINUX in a Wrist Watch

• 8 MB RAM • 8 MB Flash RAM • X-windows • Weigth: 44 Grams

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LINUX on Handhelds

Left: Compaq iPaq /206 MHz Right: YOPY /206 MHz

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Linux Elsewhere

• • • • •

IBM Mainframes www.google.com has 5000 Linux PCs in a cluster SUN Sparc processors Compaq Alpha processors Turnkey systems

– Fileservers/Intranet servers – Firewalls

Why Use Zope?

• • • • •

We want livelier content on the webservers We want access to small databases We want a framework, where we can build small applications Support for XML Audience: What else do we want?

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What Is ZOPE?

"Zope is the leading Open Source application server, specializing in interactive content such as portals and content management systems"

Everything is through-the-web Built-in programming language Integrated object database XML, WebDAV, XML-RPC, SQL, LDAP

What Can We Do With Zope?

• •

Zope comes in building blocks called "products"

– A building block provides a feature such as a guest book or announcements or workflow

There are more than 200 products right now

– It's just install and play

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Zope Products

SiteSummary - retrieve announcements from another webserver in RSS format Yihaw - Tree structure directory like in Yahoo! But extended with FAQs, announcements MeetingManagement - Lets you collect registrations for small meetings Zwiki - A permanent whiteboard for a webserver SquishDot - a bulletin board EEA ... and hundreds more

Zope ’s Role

• •

Zope

– Rapid content creation!

– Integrator of services – Can be used with little experience – Can be extended with special modules - the products

PHP

– Rapid application development – Good for prototyping – Needs programming experience

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Zope ’s Role

• •

Java Servlets

– Very flexible and low-level – Needs professional programmers – Impossible to customise for webmaster

CIRCLE

– Specialised for group work – Difficult to customize – Impossible to extend

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Zope in EIONET Context

CIRCA MYSQL HTTP LDAP Directory XML-RPC Other Zope Zope

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Creating a New Announcement

Title Expires Article The result is a record, which we can then display as HTML or XML

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XML: Alternative Formats

• •

Now as we have structured many types of data we can reuse them in many formats

: RSS for inclusion on other webservers : WML for display on WAP-phones

It is an ongoing process, and it requires a further abandonment of HTML for storage

XML HTML Format ting Convert WML SGML PDF

XML Example: NATLAN 2

Database Coordinates in XML Database NATLAN Engine Augmented map Web browser

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Zope Demonstration

• Now We switch to a live demonstration of Zope

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