We just release ZPTKit 0.1, a library to integrate Zope Page Templates into Webware. It's the first open source software that Imaginary Landscape has released; there's a certain challenge to getting something out there, since it is true that this doesn't offer any immediate benefit to the company. Though at the same time this sort of infrastructure (since this is just a library, it doesn't do anything) is the kind of thing where open source benefits require the least investment -- by both using open tools and building open tools, it gets us to produce a solid foundation of software. And that is very beneficial, without any question -- all the difficulty in open sourcing something is almost completely in polishing the software so it's fit for external consumption. But in many ways it is to an organization's disadvantage to build things that are obscure and require undocumented knowledge. So it's good process.

Imaginary Landscape has been using the library internally for maybe six months -- as soon as we developed applications in Webware (before we just used Zope), I wanted to keep some common technology, and ZPT was a good candidate -- it's already packaged separately, it's a part of the system (templates) that gets exposed to lots of people in the organization, and it's just a good templating system. A little verbose at times, but it always lets me do what I need to do, which is far more important.

I've been very happy with out it has worked, and how it both fits into the structure of the applications, and helps direct that structure. It encourages model-view-controller design without being heavy-handed or even explicit about it; it's just the natural way applications evolve when the tools are there. I hope to work out a basic framework of a Webware application, that is less free-form than the standard examples (along the lines of tell me what to do); but that's something we're still working out internally, even if we've gotten closer.

Well, next off to PyCon. I'll be at the WSGIKit Sprint on Monday and Tuesday; I'll be in DC on Saturday and Sunday, but I thought I'd actually see a little of the city this year, and Emily will also be there (she's in Baltimore right now attending the yearly conference for National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts).