Zope

This year, EuroPython is in Florence, Italy, which is ca. 140km from where I live now. It couldn't get easier to attend and propose a talk: Web development is a complexity challenge nowadays. Growing number of functionalities results in customer ... [More] expectations increase which makes project design more difficult. Using proper tools that suite your customer needs is essential. In this talk I would like to present two successful stories using closely together Pyramid and Plone. Basing on these examples I wished to highlight the main reasons for using Plone as a CMS only and letting Pyramid do the rest (vertical application). Moreover, I will underscore good and bad practices during integration process and how to make farsighted architectural decisions in a right moment. This year, everyone who has bought EuroPython ticket can vote. So If you have one and you'd like to see this talk, vote for it directly from abstract page. [Less]

After 6 years at the Graphics Garage, my big projects there seems to be done. I've written three big systems there: Two of them to administrate every bit of the company, including organizing all the communication with the clients into an Extranet sol...

Training for the 2011 Plone Symposium East begins in just over a month.  It's time to get registered! Early-birds who register by today (April 11) earn a $75 discount off the price of symposium registration. The symposium will be held on the ... [More] beautiful Penn State campus in Central Pennsylvania and will feature excellent talks, training, sprints and an exciting chance to partake in fellowship and collaboration with fellow Plone developers! So sign up for the symposium by midnight EST, today (April 11, 2011) and save $75 on registration.You can find out more at http://guest.cvent.com/d/tdqbwd/1Q Note: Registration for training is separate from Symposium registration (training sessions may or may not have early-bird registrations of their own). [Less]

It’s Google Summer of Code time again, and the Python Software Foundation is of course involved. Many of the proposals involve Python 3, so I decided to make a special Python GSoC student discount on my Porting to Python 3 book. Ten bucks off for  ... [More] students for the Python Software Foundation or Plone Foundation! To get the special discount code, mail me at [email protected], and I’ll verify that you are a student for Python or Plone, and send you the discount code. You will have to buy it via the CreateSpace shop. Filed under: python, python3 [Less]

Plone 4.1 is in its final beta stage, soon to be released as final. So it's once again time to look at its performance improvements.In Plone 4.0 we have focussed on improving Plone's raw rendering speed but also memory consumption and handling of ... [More] binary files. These improvements benefit sites of all sizes and flavors.On the performance side we have focussed on a different area for Plone 4.1: the catalog. The catalog is responsible for all searches, content listings, portlet listings, the section tabs, the sitemap, the reference engine, uuid lookups and many more things.For small to medium sites with maybe up to 10.000 content items the performance has been fine. But once your sites gets multiples of 10.000 content items up to millions the performance starts to degrade rapidly.Over the last couple of years various companies and community members have worked on this problem. So far these improvements have only been available as add-on components with varying degrees of maturity. For Plone 4.1 we have taken the stable and proven bits and integrated them back into the core.The improvements fall into two broad categories: Improving the data stored in indexes and optimizing the internal search algorithms.On the storage side we have added two new specialized index types: a UUID index and a boolean index. We use them per default in Plone and update your existing indexes during the upgrade. We've also updated almost all existing indexes to store data more efficiently, just store less data or reduce the conflict error potential for concurrent write operations.On the search side the biggest change is the introduction of a queryplan. All catalog searches are now instrumented to collect runtime information. Based on this data subsequent catalog searches will be executed in an optimized way. The process is fully transparent and needs no configuration. You can inspect the plan and reports about slow catalog queries in the ZMI screens of the catalog tool.But in what kind of improvement does this result in?For a small site or a default empty Plone site there's no measurable difference. The good news being that there's no measurable overhead of all these changes.In order to illustrate the impact I used one large real site and tweaked it to resemble a default Plone 4.0 and 4.1. The actual production site runs various of the mentioned improvements via experimental backports, so I had to take those out to get a realistic comparison. The site in question has about 250,000 content objects with mostly published content. It uses LinguaPlone and has many portlets listing latest news or related content, so most pages do a number of catalog queries. As each catalog query is faster, you get cumulative effects.In the graph I show the timings for the frontpage, a news archive with 4,000 news items per language, a normal page and it's edit screen.For pages doing either multiple catalog searches or catalog searches over large amounts of content we get an improvement of 2x up to 4x. For an edit screen that doesn't even show the navigation tree, there's less benefit. But even rendering the top sections and the language selector results in a 1.4x improvement for this site.I did the testing on my local iMac with 3GHz and 8gb of RAM while the data was coming from a direct file storage. Effectively all operations were done with all data coming from the ZODB cache or from the operating systems disk cache from memory.In reality the improvements will be larger, as we read far fewer objects from the database and thus avoid talking to the actual database over the network and doing disk reads. You will also likely be able to reduce the size of the ZODB cache without negatively affecting performance. The freed memory can be used to add more Zope instances or to decrease the hardware cost of running the site.But of course the results for any given production environment will vary a lot. And none of these numbers reflect real world usage, as visitors will get served cached content from a reverse proxy in most cases. With the inclusion of plone.app.caching into Plone 4.1 setting up efficient caching has become much easier.There's many more improvements in this area that we will do. But with Plone 4.1 you should be able to run a Plone site with multiples of 10.000 of content items without the need for custom development - system administration knowledge to set up the application cluster and database is still a must though. [Less]

In zope we can set the cache header per methods or views (if we so wish). I usually do this to cache views/methods that use reources and may slow down response; e.g querying 1000 rows and do calculation, etc. Sometimes I do this just because there's weofije...

So, the saga continues for transitioning one of my oldest Zope applications to be ready for passing the Zope 2.10 unicode breakpoint. For now I've reached the point where all the existing tests pass again. When I removed sys.setdefaultencoding it was...

If you haven't applied but wish to you will find the summer of code home page here http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/homepage/google/gsoc2011.  If you know of a student who is interested and are not sure that they have made their proposal, please ... [More] pass this along. Each year, Google's Summer of Code program funds university students around the world with stipends of $5000US to spend 12 weeks working on advancing open source projects.  With news of Plone acceptance, we're accepting applications from students interested in being involved, as well as mentors to help oversee their work. You can see a list of some of the ideas which have been put out there for student projects on the Plone Summer of Code Ideas Page. Leading Plone's GSoC effort this year is Kevin Kalupson. Students interested in applying can find out more on the GSOC website or getting feedback on their ideas on Plone mailing lists and IRC at #plone. [Less]

They used the mapfish web framework (python based: pylons) for a website about bio-energy. They developed it fully using open source software and they also were open (to the other project partners) during development (which was new for ... [More] them). Software they used: postgis, mapserver, mapfish, openlayers. For the development process: trac. Before starting the main development, they had a workshop with all participants where they talked about the project. Looking at geo websites they liked, for instance. Coming up with user interface ideas. Everyone was really energized by the workshop. The software was developed by several people and companies so everyone was constantly working on the same code. Some of the participants normally worked alone ("einzelkaempfer") and they liked it a lot to be able to cooperate for a change. Some advantages of this development model: Broad acceptance of the web application by cooperative development and early involvement. Knowledge transfer. Everyone has a much broader knowledge than would otherwise have been the case. Costs and resource usage was lower. Important for the municipal organisation that started the project: costs is always a problem and they simply don't have the resources anymore to do everything themselves. Intelligent, friendly, fun cooperation. See http://www.energieatlas.org/ (click on "bioenergie"). [Less]

Grok 1.4 is a feature release of Grok based on the Zope Toolkit 1.1.1. The Grok development team is happy to announce the Grok 1.4 release! This release brings several new features and bugfixes. The list of Grok specific package version can be found ... [More] here: http://grok.zope.org/releaseinfo/1.4/versions.cfg To upgrade existing project you might find the upgrade notes helpful, to be found here: http://grok.zope.org/doc/1.4/upgrade.html Amongst other changes, Grok 1.4 brings: New features in grokcore.view like allowing for the use of the grok.provides() directive in view components, the addition of a grok:ignoreTemplates ZCML directive to configure what template filename extensions are to be ignore when reporting unassociated templates, improved reporting of unassociated templates and improved grok.template() directive inheritance. New Subscriptions and MultiSubscriptions components from grokcore.component Includes the latest zope.testbrowser version that is based on WebOb and WebTest. Besides working on code, the Grok community is also working on improving the documentation, both the "official" documentation and the "community"-driven efforts. This is quite an undertaking and not yet finished. [Less]