[Zope] My notes from the Paris EuroZope meeting

[Simon Coles]

Hi,

During the EuroZope meeting I was taking notes for my own use, and a 
couple of people asked if I would make them more widely available - 
so here they are.

Because they were taken during the session (and I've got RSI :-) they 
are bitty and may not make sense. They are also only a reflection of 
what I typed, not of what was said and its importance :-) so any 
mistakes are my fault and I humbly apologise now. Mostly these notes 
cover Paul's talk in the morning, as my machine was the IRC terminal 
for the afternoon sessions.

Anyway, for what its worth, here you are....

----------------------------------------------------------

The meeting:
  - 60 People turned up - overflowed the room and it became very warm :-(
  - 50% of the people there use Linux as their primary OS.

Paul's talk
===========

(PE = Paul Everitt, OSS = Open Source, DC = Digital Creations)

(show of hands) Most people view the fact that Zope is free and Open Source is
the major thing about it.

Believes DC has a sustainable business model for OSS - Red Hat etc. don't.

Lots of stuff in Zope originally comes from DC's work with Newspapers - users
being able to edit stuff, undo, etc.

DC and business model
  - DC were spun out of a newspaper consortium who considered the object stuff
    "worthless" so gave it to DC when they were spun out.
  - They realised they needed to be a service/consulting company - not a product
    company - because the market was already done on web application servers and
    it would require *massive* amounts of investment to even have a chance of
    competing.
  - Their first investment was a banker who used the stuff and then called them
    to invest. Following that minority investment he convinced them to 
release it
    all as OSS. The rest is history etc.
  - First round investment, spent it on Zope, not DC. DC != Zope. Because then
    Zope doesn't appear commercial, protects the OSS nature. They don't want to
    dominate Zope, but they want to back it.
  - People are throwing money at DC, seems like intelligent money not any old VC
    trying to get on bandwaggon. 2nd round of money spent on Zope, 3rd round of
    money spent on DC.
  - In '99 made no money. In '00 they turned sales on, and all hell 
broke loose -
    Zope is hot property, "people were beating themselves up in the sales
    funnel".
  - DC is 30 people.
  - Additional investments in DC are on the horizon, which should mean more of
    everything for Zope

 From Business Partner's perspective will get more formalised etc.

Brian Lloyd was employee number 1 of DC, now product manager of Zope. 
His number 1 goal is to open up Zope - make Zope bigger than DC. 
Giving other people checkin authority is a big aim. They do OSS 
distribution but not OSS development at the moment (because DC do the 
development). Therefore number 1 priority.

DC are involved in Mozilla and are getting a good idea of how they run OSS. He
later demo'd the Zope studio, and it looks interesting.

Zope will still have a benevolent dictator model. They come out of the Python
community so will be like that.

Was some discussion around how to run large OSS projects etc.

Big things will happen in the next 6 months. Lots of opportunity, 
sky's the limit etc. What do you want in Zope 3?

"The Soul of Zope" - how do you describe Zope, where its going etc. Very hard.
........"Focussed on rapid deployment of rich solutions to diverse
audiences". This drives into 3 things... (see later - "More power for more
people", "All tiers as managed content", "Web API")

Objects on the web that ordinary people can walk up to and do rich and
interesting stuff - and then they can talk those objects and do their 
own thing.

Diverse - so everyone in the food chain. Things that Work the way people work.
Allow people to recover from their mistakes.

More power for more people - safely delegating control, use web as complete
object system. Security, undo, versions, transactions - all those things that
stop people from screwing things up.

All tiers as managed content. Similar to 3 tier model.  The way all 
the existing
app servers do is wrong, the way they are doing it right. 
Presentation and logic
on file system - hierarchical storage model, messy to admin etc. When you want
to cluster, you need to cluster the file system - hard/expensive. presentation
managed differently from logic (different tools). Different data model for data
("square" - tabular, not hierarchical). So each layer completely 
different and independent. Zope wants to treat each layer in the same 
way. Will all look and feel very similar. Cluster, manage, search 
etc. Presentation, logic, data.

This is a sweet spot for Zope. Gives a scorecard for Zope design decisions.

Tools for developing objects

GoLive 5 have great WevDAV.

WEbDAv will get a lot better.

Python products could be endangered species because its managed in the file
system, which isn't in the "all tiers as managed content" thing.

Web API SOAP is big as well. Tim O'Rielly - "should Amazon have an API?".

Zope is better at the API thing than everything else out there, as the entire
API is exposed to things like XML-RPC.

Microsoft's .NET is going to happen, OSS will have an alternative, 
Zope wants to participate in that. Zope could become the OSS .NET 
server alternative.


Zope futures
------------

Major thing is usability which involves:
  - Documentation
  - User Interface
  - Concepts - try to reuse concepts elsewhere rather than coming up with their
    own

Next thing is hardening - security, reliability

Have Oracle ZODB back end now, they are deploying it now, will release but want
to document

On concepts - there's enough in XML DOM to mean they don't have to 
live in their
own little world. Maybe should use the DOM instead of the Zope API. Also
schemas, component models. Therefore want to turn Zope from an app server into
an XML application server, so if you know XML you will feel very at home in
Zope. Therefore they don't have to write docs, they can just send people to W3C
:-)

Will use 4Thought's DOM (standard DOM for Python), ZDOM will go away.

XML will be the interface, but internal to Zope for performance reasons, it
will be normal Zope objects.

Your entire Zope site will look like one big XML document.

XML object database with the trimmings (cache, transactions, distributed etc.)
will be very compelling for XML people.

They hope that XML will be considered safer than Oracle (Vs ACS, which uses
Oracle)

Other major effort is PTK - but the name won't last much longer. Meant to be
beginning of strategy for DC & Zope where Zope is a platform with 
many products.
But been confused - "Should Zope be a product" - and useful out of the box. But
for who? Hence decide that Zope will be a facility for creating solutions, and
won't be the product. Therefore UI and docs for Zope will be focussed on a
particular audience (developers). Problem in the past was they couldn't say no.

PTK will be a product running on Zope, and will allow DC to get into 
the Content
Management market, where they will make their money.

CM market is dominated by StoryServer - very large prehistoric beasts,
proprietary lock-in model. Pay $1M to get something that doesn't do what you
want to do, then another $1M to customise. Feel OSS will go over very 
well in the CM market rather then DB or others. Because CM is real 
bet the business
decision, hence OSS because more control.

CM companies make their money on their services, therefore OSS the 
product won't
lose revenue.

Expect interesting/wierd things to happen with PTK, ZEO, and ASP model.

With PTK, Create something that's useful out of the box, other people 
working on
it beside DC, focus on site designers not developers so much.


Keen to understand what people want from Zope 3, what they would do 
if they were
PE.

PTK is a product on Zope platform which is immediately useful for the problem
domain of content management and portals.

Shared set of services and then people will work with those things either by
being a member or a manager of a site.


PTK
---
(quite a lot of PTK stuff was dealt with in the above talk)

all default content is catalog aware

in the ptk, the search engines looks different depending on who you are -
depending on security roles etc.

(bit of business partner stuff thrown in to PTK talk) They have referred out 15
bits of business. Feel that things like PTK need a large developer/consulting
community.

PTK architecture now being used be DC consulting contracts.

Wizards look cool.

PTK UI is worth looking at.

Calling it a Portal was a mis-name. Was called Portal before Portals became
something. Expect new name.

Are they planning to move into ECommerce like Vignette? "It has to be there to
be competitive, but DC need help on it. Does someone want to write a spec for
it?"

Groups != Roles. Roles are really what is important, hence although its harder
for people to wrap their head around, they will stay with Roles. But got some
objections and good reasons why there should be groups - listened attentively -
therefore asked please write up for dev.zope.org

They are taking requests for Zope 2.3 now, so get writing.


Business partner programme
--------------------------

They have had lots of interest

Creating one is very hard

Its very important to them that Zope > DC

They want to match customers to businesses in a way that's good for everyone

3/4 of people at the meeting were interested in the business partner programme

DC are currently occupied by 4 major customers.

What do DC want from Business Partner programme:
  - "Better revenue" - allow DC to focus on platform work, as a tech
    partner/provider
  - Different levels of membership (with different levels of attention from DC)
  - Quickly grow the number of solutions on the platform

Continue to focus Zope on business issues, rather than on technology - in
contrast to most OSS projects which are generally about technology with little
business relevance.

What do businesses want from Business Partner programme:
  - Leads
  - Certification

There is a private mailing list for the Business Partner programme.

Certification will have implications for the Zope release schedule (as will
other things, like increasing popularity). They are going to move to something
more like the Linux Kernel release scheme, with development and 
stable versions.

Business Partner programme is very important revenue opportunity for 
DC, but not
decided how yet. Support programmes are the main thing.

----------------------------------------------------------

Overall, it was an excellent meeting and well worth attending. Thanks 
to all of those who made it happen, to Republic Alley 
(http://www.republicalley.com) for the use of their offices, and Paul 
for spending his holiday with us (and Paul's wife for letting him :-).




Simon
-- 
--------- My opinions are my own, NIP's opinions are theirs ----------
Simon J. Coles                                 Email: simon@nipltd.com
New Information Paradigms                  Work Phone: +44 1344 753703
http://www.nipltd.com/                     Work Fax:   +44 1344 753742
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