[lug] BLUG December 9, 1999 Meeting Summary

[Wayde Allen]

            Boulder Linux User's Group Meeting Summary
            ==========================================


Attendance: 48

Synopsis:  The meeting started out with Glen Ashton giving us a follow up
report on the Install/Info fest that was held Nov. 20, 1999.  This event
was successful with at least 100 people attending.  Glen is already
planning on the next such activity, and expects this to be sometime in the
spring of 2000.

The featured speaker for the evening was Joe VanAndel with a presentation
about the Z Object Publishing Environment ZOPE (http://www.zope.org). 
Zope is an open source product put out by Digital Creations
(http://www.digicool.com/) that competes with products such as Cold
Fusion, Silverstream, and Netscape Application Server.  It was written using
the Python programming language (http://www.python.org/).  Zope has an
integrated object database and can also access several relational
databases.  ZOPE's object publishing system converts a URL to a method
call of a ZOPE object, which provides a very powerful and flexible
application architecture.  The object database supports "sessions" that
allow new content to be developed on the "live" server without being
publicly visible until it is "released".  The object database also
supports a powerful "undo" facility which can back out any change,
restoring a previous version of the web site.  Zope is managed
"thru-the-web", without requiring telnet or rlogin access to the server. 
ZOPE offers customizable security, giving password controlled access to
various portions of your ZOPE web site. 

We wrapped up the evening with our usual question and answer period and
door prize drawing.  The prizes this month were KRUD CD's, a book on Red
Hat Linux with accompanying CD, and O'Reilly's new book and CD set for
Debian.  Chuck Morrison and Michael Hammel also brought a large collection
of "Linux Journal" and "Linux" magazines that were given away on a first
come first served basis.

Next Meeting:  January 13, 2000, Topic to be announced (LaTeX?)