zope.introspector 0.1

What is zope.introspector?

zope.introspector helps developers to get information about objects in their Zope/Python runtime environment.

It provides an easy to use API that enables developers to create ‘object descriptors’ for any object and is usable in almost every Zope environment, namely Zope 2, Zope 3 and Plone. Although zope.introspector is mainly tested with Python 2.4, also Python 2.5 installs should work.

zope.introspector is extensible. That means, that you can write your own descriptors for certain types of objects or aspects thereof. Please see the detailed documentation in ‘src/zope/introspector’ to learn more about that.

The package does not provide viewing components. Instead you can use packages, that are built on top of zope.introspector. These provide viewing components, that apply to more specific frameworks like Plone or Grok.

Installing zope.introspector

zope.introspector is provided as an Python egg on cheeseshop and set up via zc.buildout

You may have setuptools already installed for your system Python. In that case, you may need to upgrade it first because buildout requires a very recent version:

$ sudo easy_install -U setuptools

If this command fails because easy_install is not available, there is a good chance you do not have setuptools available for your system Python. If so, there is no problem because setuptools will be installed locally by buildout.

Because zope.introspector is a developer tool, you normally use it by including the package the setup.py file of your own package. There will most probably a section called install_requires where you add ‘zope.introspector’ like this:

...
install_requires=['setuptools',
                  # Add extra requirements here
                  'zope.introspector',
                  ...
                  ],

In zc.buildout based package setups you can ‘activate’ usage of zope.introspector afterwards simply by (re)running bin/buildout.

Feature changes

• Initial Release