Webfinger is a proposal for a protocol for defining account identifiers and obtaining
resources for this account. It is defined on Google Code and discussed in the
WebFinger Google Group.
Virtualenv
An isolated Python environment. Allows you to control which
packages are used on a particular project by cloning your main
Python. virtualenv
was created by Ian Bicking.
Setuptools
Setuptools
builds on Python’s distutils to provide easier building,
distribution, and installation of libraries and applications.
LRDD
LRDD stands for Link-based Resource Descriptor Discovery. More
information on it can be found on this post by Eran Hammer-Lahav. It also
describes the relationship to XRD and the three possible
discovery methods.
Resource Description
A Resource Description document is a description of an actual resource,
e.g. a web document or a user account defined by an URI. For a user
account it can e.g. contain links to other resources of that user.
Zope Component Architecture
The Zope Component Architecture (aka ZCA) is a system
which allows for application pluggability and complex dispatching
based on objects which implement an interface.
Interface
A Zope interface
object. In pydataportability.discovery, interfaces are used
to identify plugins. You can think of it as something like a type
for a component.
You can use the Zope Component Architecture to look components
up by their interface and optionally with an additonal name.
acct URI scheme
The proposed acct: URI scheme was invented by the Webfinger
group. It is meant as a format for email-like user identifiers such as
acct:joe@foobar.com. Compared to mailto: is has a different
semantic meaning as it’s not meant to be used for sending mail but
to simply identify a single user on a specific host. In Webfinger
it is used as a URI on which discovery is taking place, resulting in a
Resource Description document with more pointers to the user’s
resources stored elsewhere. For more information consult the
Webfinger discussion group and wiki.
Utility
A utility is one of the component types the Zope Component Architecture
defines. It is usually a class implementing a utility function which
can be identified by an interface it implements. It is a global object
(singleton) which can be retrieved by it’s interface. This makes it possible
to replace utilities being used in a framework in your own code by
simply registering your utility instead of the framework one. This omit
changes to the framework.
named utility
A Named Utility is a Utility which additional to it’s Interface
is identified also by name. This way you can provide different utilities
for the same Interface with different names as it’s done in
pydataportability.discovery where you can have various utilities
implementing IDiscoveryService with different names which can also have
their try on finding a Resource Description.
