Grok Retrospector

As announced on the ZF GSOC list I would like to reimplement the Grok introspector. To finish this task I might perform the following steps, which are partly derived from Lennart Regebros call for feature requests for a introspector tool (http://regebro.wordpress.com/2008/02/17/what-would-you-want-from-a-component-introspector-debugging-tool/) and from an an IRC meeting with Lennart Regebro, Martijn Faassen, Martin Lundwall and Jesper Petersen on April 5th, where we already worked out a plan to separate and coordinate the tasks concerning the design and implementation of a new, resusable introspection API and related UI components in both, Zope 2 and Zope 3 environments.

• Factor out the Grok admin UI into a separate package

• zope.introspector:

  Design and implement a basic Zope API zope.introspector, which should be reusable in any Zope 2 and Zope 3 environment, namely Plone and, of course, Grok. This might be completed as a collaborative effort of Martin Lundwall, Jesper Petersen and me. We already did some planning to coordinate our work during GSOC on April, 5 (see below).

  Design goals:

  • Reusable in any Zope-based environment.
  • Extensible in a sense to help building of more specific introspectors in more specific environemts like Plone or Grok.
  • Should gather all important runtime-information of a running Zope framework, which are not Zope 2/Zope 3 specific. including classes, attributes, etc. What "important runtime-information" means in detail, will be worked out during first phase of GSOC together with other introspection minded students, namely Martin Lundwall and Jesper Petersen. I can bring in my experiences from writing the current Grok introspector here and would do so in any case, whether my application will be accepted or not.
  • No own UI, but with possibility to plugin custom UIs?, so that viewers/browsers can be built quite easily.
  • As little dependencies as necessary. Probably zope.interface and zope.component only.

• Rebuild docgrok based on the renewed zope.introspector. Currently, docgrok is mainly build on apidoc, which is (currently) not Zope 2 compatible and at some places too tightly bound to views and a 'book' structure.

  The new docgrok should grab at leas the following additional information (not provided by zope.introspector):

  • explicitly and silently (by defaul) applied grok directives for a specific object.
  • views and layers for a specific object.

• Build a new Grok introspector UI based on docgrok.

  I hope to get some feedback here from the Grok-community during work.

  The new Grok introspector-UI must perform at least:

  • displaying of explicitly and silently (by default) applied grok directives.
  • displaying of views and layers available for a specific object
  • displaying of ZODB objects
  • displaying of runtime-objects like classes/interfaces/packages most probably based on apidoc.
  • displaying of accompanied txt file in packages.
  • (eventually) displaying code

  The Grok introspector UI should be extensible, so that custom UIs? can be used by other Grok projects to use it on their own.

• If there is enough time also writing back of modified values might be possible for at least simple values.

Minor Tasks

• Complete the Grok testsetup support

  • Finish implementation of grok.testing.testsetup support.
  • Extend documentation on testing for endusers/developers.

• Complete i18n support:

  • Finish implementation of a Grok directive to register locales in the Python code of Grok projects, to make use of the appropriate ZCML directive obsolete.

• Improve broken objects support (eventually)

  • Broken objects in the ZODB can't be easily deleted/changed currently. While the situation is a bit better in Grok (I already implemented deletion of broken objects), a possibility to grab data from those is still missing. This follows the proposal on the ZF GSOC page by Christian Theune.

• Do bugfixes of open issues with Grok and grokproject.

Week 0-3:

As mentioned above, I already coordinated with Martin Lundwall, Jesper Petersen, Lennart Regebro and Martijn Faassen for the introspection related stuff. Because this will be an important base for other main tasks, I will start with this (zope.introspector API) and hope, that we will have a usable implementation ready by the third or fourth week of GSOC.

I expect some idle time here, due to coordination matters, which could be filled with factoring out the admin app.

Week 4-6:

In a second phase I'd like to write the Grok extension for the zope.introspector, finish grok.testing and i18n-support.

Week 7-10:

The third phase will include the frontends (WebGUI?) for ZODB browsing and afterwards browsing of other runtime objects. Here feedback from Grok community will be important.

Week 11:

The fourth phase might include mainly final finetuning and testing of all topics, presenting results to the community (where not already happened), bugfixing and getting feedback.