This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Python Buzz
by Carlos de la Guardia.
Original Post: Plone, Grok, Repoze fill 2009 plans
Feed Title: I blog therefore I am
Feed URL: http://blog.delaguardia.com.mx/feed.atom
Feed Description: A space to put my thoughts into writing.
I have not blogged a lot lately, so I'm trying to use the energy the new year provides for getting some rhythm back into my postings. I like blogging, but writing posts takes a lot of time and that's been harder to find lately. I have found my blog and other time sinks like Twitter and IRC to be not only entertaining, but actually useful for my work, but right now I feel one of those has to go. Since blogging is harder, I wonder if this is a lost battle already...anyway, on to my exclusive 2009 preview.
Plone will once again bring home the bacon this year. I already have a couple of projects booked and, despite the economical crisis, it seems like I'll be able to land a couple of outsourcing gigs here and there. It's a great time to be working with Plone, though doing so effectively requires you to keep current on lots of technologies and ideas. Zope 3 libraries and concepts have not yet finished transforming Plone, while at the same time there's a push for simplicity that will bring still more changes to the table as Plone 4.0 comes around.
The effort employed in keeping current is not wasted, as I have usually a couple of chances each year to offer Plone training here in México or in other Spanish speaking countries south of the border. Since we are actively trying to make Plone more popular in México through our newly formed user group, I hope I get a few more training opportunities this year than in 2008.
Speaking of training, allow me to do a little advertising. My friends and colleagues at Jazkarta will be offering a course in Montreal next week, on January 13th. If you live near that area and are thinking about getting into Plone, you should strongly consider taking advantage of the discount that they offer through this link. If you do that, I'll give any referral fees I get straight to the Plone Foundation.
My work in Plone for 2009 will be centered around a project I'm doing for the Library of Congress in Chile. The main objective of this project is to get Plone used as a CMS backend and push the content into a relational database with the help of the remarkable ContentMirror product. This content will be used by several frontends powered by other Python web frameworks. Thus Plone will be used for what it does best and other web development work will be done on the frontend application. The idea is to make Plone the Product a lot more appealing for developers who use other Python web frameworks. The project is in an advanced state and a release will be coming before March, when I will be showing this work at the PyCon in Chicago.
As part of this work I've developed yet another ajaxy page composition tool for Plone, which will also be released near March. This tool uses the Component Architecture for easy extensibility and includes a CSS grid layout generator based on YUI Grids. In previous work for magazines and newspapers I've found that they are always very interested in this kind of solution and even though Plone 4 will be exploring other approaches to solve this problem, at least the use of layouts and tiles give my product something in common with the future of Plone.
For my frontend work I have been using repoze.bfg and I have to say that I really like it. It's simple, flexible and very, very fast. In my tests I've been serving Plone content at around 400 requests per second, before caching (I'm getting 10 or so from Plone, so do the math). One of the nice things about repoze.bfg is that it uses familiar Zope concepts and technologies, so an experienced Plone developer will find it a breeze to get going. It won't force you to use those concepts in your code, though, so Python developers with no Zope experience can also get some productive work done. I highly recommend that you get a look at this framework.
While you are at it take a good look at the repoze project, which is a separate initiative coming from the same guys, the Zope legends at Agendaless Consulting. The objective of this project is to get Zope technologies working with other Python web frameworks using WSGI. So far there's a lot of middleware available and special distributions of Plone, Grok and Zope that work in a WSGI pipeline. I hope I can contribute to the repoze.* projects as part of my open source work in 2009.
One other Python web framework that I will be using a lot in 2009 is Grok, which is the best way right now to take advantage of Zope 3 technologies. A frontend for my Chile project is on the works and I hope I get to use it for other applications throughout the year. There's also a future project with Grok that involves something I have wanted to do for a long time, but I'll write about this when I get to do it.
In all, this is a very promising year, with a lot of work ahead. A lot of things are going on in the Python world and it will be fun to be a part of it. I wish you all a very active and rewarding 2009.
Previous Topic
