Netsight Blog

So thought I'd do a quick update of what we've been up to in the past couple of weeks, as things have been pretty busy here at Netsight.

First thing to mention is that whilst we are primarily known for our Plone work, the three largest projects that we are working on at the moment are not based on Plone. Aha! the doomsayers say, Plone is declining etc etc. But in fact the opposite, this is a positive thing... let me explain:

One of the main criticisms of Zope and Plone back when they started was that they were not very 'pythonic' ie. everything in Zope and Plone was done differently in every other python system. Some would say that Zope was so ahead of it's time that there wasn't anything else out there, so it was blazing its own trail.

Zope 2 was a very monolithic system and you basically had to use the entire stack. Not only that but every part of the stack was different to any other stack out there in the world. It was a big learning curve. The 'Z' shaped learning curve. Plone came along and hid a lot of this complexity to the average user, and simple customisation could be done fairly simply. As Plone got bigger, things got more complex, and some really clever stuff to make core developers lives easier made some simple customisations more tricky. This is now being addressed, and for Plone 4 much is being removed, creating a much sleeker system.

However the biggest wins for the likes of companies like Netsight that have to recruit, train and retain developers is that there is much more transferable code and skills between Zope and Plone and the rest of the python world. Since much of Plone nowadays is developed in the much more flexible Zope 3 style using Component Architecture you can transfer between other frameworks like Grok repoze.bfg, vudo... and not just the Zope based ones... but its now much easier to move back and forth with WSGI based frameworks like Werkzeug, Pylons, etc.

This is such a tangible benefit for a business. We have recently hired a new developer to work on one of the projects below, and we are currently looking for yet another developer to join us. What is great, is we can look for just 'python' developers, not specifically 'plone' developers as they don't need to know 'plone' now like they used to in order to be productive in a Plone environment.

To give some examples of this, let me talk about a few really interesting projects Netsight is working on at the moment... none of which directly involve Plone, but which all use skills transferable to and from modern Plone development. A no doubt Plone will be stirred into the mix at some point in both these projects' near future.

The first is a several month support and development contract with a large academic-related business. They employ 1,500 staff and their business is interacting with teachers and students across the globe. They built (using internal people) several Zope based web systems for managing the interactions with these teachers and students. These were built quite a few years ago, and are in need of a bit of a refresh and can do with moving to Zope 3. With the help of another company they have moved most of the code out of the ZODB and onto the filesystem so it can me managed much easier. Our first task is to build an events management system for them. They run events worldwide, and this system will take care of bookings and related tasks.

What makes this project so interesting is that we are able to now develop using Zope 3 style and technologies via Five on a Zope 2 existing system. This is really nice as it gives us a much nicer development model (classes, views, adapters etc) rather than the old style of a bunch of 'Script (Python)' objects. It makes it much easier for us to debug (via pdb) and to benchmark and test. Not only that, but we have a new developer working on the project, who whilst has python experience, has little specific Zope experience. Working in this way he has been able to concentrate on the pythonic aspects and leave the core Zope tasks to the more experienced developer on the project.

The second project is really quite a fun challenge. We are dynamically re-skinning an existing .NET portal site... without touching the original site. We are using a WSGI stack with modules that we are developing based upon xdv to dynamically clean up the (nasty, broken) HTML from the original portal and present a nice clean, reskinned site to the end user. Oh, and as we are gluttons for punishment, we are re-writing the URLs of the site too...