1. EEA EIONET Development Tools and Philosophy ITTAG Meeting Athens 20 th September, 2000 Søren Roug

2. EEA Agenda What is Open Source? EIONETs Software Tools PHP Why Linux What is Zope Zope Products What is Zopes Role? Zope in EIONET Context Creating a new announcement XML: alternative formats XML example: NATLAN2 Zope demonstration

3. EEA 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

4. EEA 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?

5. EEA MPL: Contracting Companys Rights 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

6. EEA 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. Thats why we chose MPL *Much* more emphasis on design documentation

7. 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

8. EEA 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

9. EEA 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

10. EEA LINUX in a Wrist Watch 8 MB RAM 8 MB Flash RAM X-windows Weigth: 44 Grams

11. EEA LINUX on Handhelds Left: Compaq iPaq /206 MHz Right: YOPY /206 MHz

12. EEA 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

13. EEA 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?

14. EEA 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

15. EEA 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

16. EEA 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... and hundreds more

17. EEA Zopes 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

18. EEA Zopes 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

19. EEA Zope in EIONET Context Zope CIRCA MYSQL LDAP Directory Other Zope XML-RPC HTTP

20. EEA Creating a New Announcement Title Expires Article The result is a record, which we can then display as HTML or XML

21. EEA 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 SGML Format ting HTML PDF WML Convert

22. EEA XML Example: NATLAN 2 Coordinates in XML NATLAN Engine Database Augmented map Web browser Database

23. EEA Zope Demonstration Now We switch to a live demonstration of Zope