Well, here we are. I have finally found the time to get this website running and have CoreBlog installed. People who know me and my talkaktiveness well enough, have probably been wondering what took me so long...

So let me introduce myself here briefly. I have worked as a Systems Administrator for an international Law Firm until August 2005, and am working now for the School Departement at City of Munich. I have a strong affinity to Open Source / Free Software and to Web Technologies in general.

My Favorite piece of Open Source Software ist the leading Web-Application Server ZOPE. I have been around the German speaking Zope User Group (DZUG) for a while and am a founding member and part of the board of the DZUG e.V. who has been founded to sharpen up the Community in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

Enough boring facts about me, though. ;-) Let's see what the future will bring.

After Guido van Rossum asked for suggestions which Python based Web-Framework he should use, there were some negative Remarks on Zope calling it unpythonic and stuff again. Even though I do not like that "unpythonic" term at all for the same reasons as Chris McDonough I cannot resist to say that these people have not looked at Zope3 at all. Shame on you guys, Zope3 is a much different Beast than Zope2!

Some people said, they had enough of that Zope Kool-Aid and there was an Interesting Discussion about Zope vs. Django at another Blog which started as the usual Zope-Rant, which in my opinion was rather about Plone than Zope itself. Anyway, Holger Fröbe made a long but excellent Comment there why he jumped on the Zope3-Bandwagon in a similar situation - Read it! :)

I followed these discussions and would not have written about these discussions, but I found an interesting remark by Carlos de la Guardia about the which changed my mind. Especially his idea (and link about "The Koolaid Point") that there is many people hating Zope because Zope is so successfull are really good, methinks. I've had my bad days with Zope, too - but I am convinced that this is a great piece of software, especially when you need more than just a Small Website. So let's go out and spread the word!

I just read a short article online by the German "Computerwoche" where Peter Graf (Executive Vice Sales President Solution Marketing (!)) from SAP tries to draw a rather pessimistic Picture on Open Source Business Software. He says Open Source Software may be a way to reduce costs, but that is not enough. I agree. And he is right that if you think about consolidating the software stack in your (medium to large) Company , then Quality, Maturity and such aspects are very important.

However at the end he states that Open Source Business Software has not yet reached the needed level of quality and maturity to be able to survive in the next consolidation round. Well, what about immature proprietary Software, though? And:

Mr. Graf, I strongly disagree on that point. I think that there are at least two mature Open Source ERP Systems which might already give you headaches: Compiere and ERP5 (the latter based on my favorite AppServer Zope). Is it possible, that this is the same kind of FUD that Marketing People from the CMS Sector tell you because they are loosing Market Share against Open Source CMS?

Compiere has been there for years now - I think they started in 1999 and has surely reached a level of maturity.

Regarding ERP5, I recently had the pleasure to personally meet Jean-Paul Smets-Solanes from Nexedi who is the company behind ERP5 at a local DZUG Meeting here in Munich. ERP5 looks really interesting and powerful and some large consultant Companies like Unilog-Avinci are Implementing this solution, check the Partners Page at the ERP5 Website. Would these people jump on the ERP5-Bandwagon if the software was not mature enough? I doubt it.

Alexander Limi recently posted his ideas about the Roadmaps for three different upcoming Plone Versions on the developer Mailinglist. The Plone Blog has some Info and Links to the 3 Threads. Read it, if you are concerned in which directions Plone is heading!

Alexander, I am impressed. It is great to see, that people like you plan for the future. However I am also wondering whether Alexander Limi does sleep or not. ;-)

So keep up the good Work, guys and keep on struggling to make Plone CMS Nr. 1 in the world!

Optaros has just released a White Paper which is titled "Unleashing the Power of Open Source in Document Management" which describes why Open Source Solutions have good chances to compete against the established and expensive Document Management Solutions.

The Study has taken a closer look at the following Open Source Solutions:

• Alfresco
• Contineo
• Nuxeo CPS
• KnowledgeTree
• Owl
• Plone
• Open sTeam

Great, there are two Solutions which are based on Zope, namely Nuxeo CPS and Plone here :)

Optaron concludes, that each of the solutions have unique features, strengths and Weaknesses and have made up a nice chart which describes three factors which are "Application Capabilities", Enterprise Readiness" and "Community". Plone has by far the largest Community in this Comparizon, but is topped by Alfresco, when it comes to the other two.

The main reasons for this is - as I understand the Paper - it's missing versioning Support. As of Today, there still is no included or official Solution for Versioning. CMFEditions will probably be this solution in the future, but there still is no 1.0 Release, yet. Plone's lack of a decent Versioning System has been known for quite a while now. But it does not seem that important to many people. Which is something I personally do not understand.

I think a decent Versioning Solution would give Plone another serious boost when it comes to Intranet Solutions. Maybe I should take a closer look at CMFEditions again - an actual Software Bundle / Release would make this a lot easiert. *wink*

Last year I read the announcement for a web platform programming contest, and was very excited because I liked the Idea to have a couple of teams implement a web solution in different programming Languages.

The announcement said they wanted to compare Java, PHP, Perl, Python and Ruby (on Rails...) and .net. Details can be found here. However, it is not about saying "Python is better than Java or PHP" (yes, we all know it is ;)) but they stated:

 "These items will then be subject to a thorough evaluation according to scientific standards with respect to the criteria mentioned above. As most of the results cannot be quantified and many cannot even be ranked in a neutral fashion, there will be no one-dimensional result ranking of the systems. Rather, there will be an extensive report describing the findings."

Sounds great to me. What a chance to show the Power of Python+Zope3! And then 3 great Zopistas joined to form a Zope3 team: Philipp von Weitershausen, Christian Theune and Martijn Faassen wanted to show the power of Zope3 - what a great team!

Unfortunately Python was not allowed in the contest in the end, because the above team was the only python team. At the first moment I was a bit angry at the organizers - but then there is no reason, because the rules of the contest require more than one team for each language. (I still do not understand, what this has to to with quality as said here, though) btw: Ruby (on Rails) and .net are not there for the same reasons.

So what about the all so great and hyped Python frameworks like TurboGears or Django? I really hope, that there will be another context next year and that we have more Python Teams. This will be a great opportunity to show what Python and Zope3 can do.

Zope and Plone are going to be presented at large at the Munich based Trade Show "Systems" at the "Perspektive Open Source" Area in Hall B2 (Booth 110-21). This is the first Time (afaik) that Plone/Zope are at the Systems. I am very happy to announce that DZUG e.V. (for the german zope community) and 2 Companies (gocept and syslab.com) will have about 20 square Meters to present Plone, Zope3 and our friendly caveman Grok from Tuesday, 23rd of October until Friday, 26th of October.

 

We will have local Community Members from Munich and People from the two above mentioned Companies at the booth. Nicolas Bossut from ZEA Partners will be there also, to give Information about the PloneGov Project. There are some accompanying talks about Plone3 and about Web-Development with Zope3 at the "POS-Bühne". Christian Zagrodnick (gocept) will present a Zope3-based Authoring Systesm developed for the German Newspaper "Die Zeit" the "Perspektive Open Source" Conference, where I will have a short talk to present Plone as one of the leading OSS CMS as well.

 

Personally I think, that this is another necessary step to spread Zope and Plone further here in Central Europe and I am really excited to be there tomorrow. And it is also great to be with nice people at the booth, which I haven't seen for a while (like Theuni and Zagy from gocept)

 

 

 

 

 

I've had a feeling, that the Zope Community is recently coming to more activity for some months now. I was thinking about writing a Blog Entry about it, but did not dare somehow. Then I read Martijns great Blog Entry about the fourth Zope Age and now I do. Since I am still a big StarWars Fan, the "fourth Zope age" made me think about Star Wars Episode IV, which was later named "Star Wars - A new Hope". Is this a good sign? Yes methinks it is.

I felt that Zope - in the last years - was stagnating. There are reasons for this, and I do strongly agree with Martijn about the reasons and what we should do about it. It seems that Zope is technologically getting more open (e.g. repoze ),  easier to start with (i.e. Grok ) and we really need to open our community and spread the word about it. It seems that within the Zope Community many people are sort of focused inwards. This is something that - in my opinion - needs to change as well.

The lessons learned from being present at both Cebit and Systems Trade Fare Shows here in Germany is, that that we do in fact have an interesting technology and a very professional community. However, Zope is more of an Infrastructure Product which is rather difficult to "sell". That is much easier with Plone, Silva or Grok and we need to figure out how to optimally promote these altogether within the Zope Context. Many People at the booths did not know about any of the stuff we were presenting, some had heard about Plone. They did know Joomla! or Typo3, though.

At the moment, there are mostly PHP or Java based CMS solutions with different directions: the smaller and more dynamic ones are PHP and the larger, static stuff goes for Java. And that's what people are recommending. However I think, that this does not make too much sense. Why? From my experience, Web-Applications like Intranets or Websites tend to grow rapidly when they are successful. So if you start with something rather simple (like Joomla!) you may end up in 1-2 years with a technical Infrastructure that cannot cope with your growing Requirements. But that kind of scalability is something that Projects like Plone or Grok inherit from the Platform and Language they are based on: Python and Zope.

So we should go out and tell the world, that Zope based solutions can be quite dynamic since they depend on Python but that they are stable, mature, scalable and extendable since they are based on the Zope Platform. Phew, this Post has become much longer than intended - I wonder how many people read it up to here...