Large-Scale Knowledge Management Systems Using Plone Technologies - Tom Moroz- Paul Everitt- And Calvin Hendryx-Parker

7/29/2019 Large-Scale Knowledge Management Systems Using Plone Technologies - Tom Moroz- Paul Everitt- And Calvin Hendryx-Parker

1/17

PLONE SYMPOSIUMEAST 2010

PENN STATE

MAY 27, 2010


2/17

Large-scale KnowledgeManagement Systems using

Plone Technologies

Tom Moroz, Paul Everitt,Calvin Hendryx-Parker


3/17

OBJECTIVES OF TALK

Background

Technical / HostingDecisions

Future


4/17

Open Society Institute

7 core offices in U.S. and Europe

National Foundations in 32 countries

Program and grant giving activity inover 60 countries

>20 Program Areas / Initiatives


5/17

The Path to KARL 3.0:

August 2006 Software developmentbegins

May 2007 KARL v1.0 beta release

January 2008 official launch

November 2008 KARL v2.0 release

June 2009 KARL v3.0 release


6/17

Moving from Plone to BFG

Plone is great at what it does. Contentmanagement in a nice, general way.

What do you do when your project is outside of

the sweet spot? Further you need to extend Plone, the more you

fight the framework. High developer frustration.

Using BFG, we were able to maintainprogramming paradigms familiar to Zope/Plonedevelopers without using/fighting Plone.


7/17

The move from KARL 1 to KARL 2

Entirely new UI built on top of Plone--verydifferent from Plone's UI.

Much framework fighting.

Much integration with non-Plone technologies,aka Frankenplone.

Bad performance, poor reliability.

Difficult maintenance.

Difficult to provide something reasonable for non-OSI deployments.


8/17

Alternatives to Plone?

Zope2, primarily used by Plone, time tested.

Zope3, big, many dependencies, app developersencouraged to use CA.

Grok, an attempt to make Zope3 easier to use.

Django, nice, but full stack like Zope2.

Pylons/TG2, also nice but geared towards

RDB/URL dispatch.

Several others, little traction, not Zope-like


9/17

BFG

In repoze namespace, but is not really repoze.

Like Zope, but much smaller, leaner.

Speed and simplicity: "Pay only for what you eat." If youdon't need it, it's not there. If you do need it, it is easy to

put in.

Documentation: An undocumented feature or API is a bug.

Testing: 100% test coverage. Untested code is brokencode.

Collaborative culture: using and promoting non-Zopetechnologies when the are useful.

Easy to adopt for Zope developers. (Maybe non-Zopedevelopers as well.)


10/17

BFG for KARL

BFG's goals aligned nearly perfectlywith goals for KARL.

OSI wanted Plone, but not really.

Using BFG we were able to build thebest KARL we could.


11/17

KARL Technology

Python

WSGI, WebOb, Paste Deploy, virtualenv, eggs,repoze.who, Supervisor, formish, TinyMCE,

jQuery and jQuery UI, nose, twill, mod_wsgi

Zope

ZPT (Chameleon), traversal, views, security,

ZODB/ZEO, catalog, component architecture(interfaces, adapters, utilities, ZCML), buildout


12/17

Lies, Damn Lies

1,700+ unit tests, 8-10 seconds.

Startup time:


13/17

KARL Project

15 committers, 9 organizations

Launchpad: 708 total issues, 42

milestones

20 open bugs

Hosting by Six Feet Up

Web Site: www.karlproject.org


14/17

Hosting

KARL 3

Xen and CentOS

Fully Managed, Monitored


15/17

Recent & Future KARL Hosting

Moved to a new datacenter Q3 2009

Hardware to improve search Q22010

Disaster Recovery Support Q3 2010

Online Realtime Backup Q3 2010


16/17

Partners

3 partner organizations Oxfam GB

Eurasia Foundation Fahamu (Media NGO)

Ariadne (Human Rights Consortium)

Global Campaign for Education

Open Society Policy Center

Six Feet Up


17/17

The Path Forward.....

On-going software development

Development of a governance modelto make available to both large andsmall organizations

The importance of soft technologyand methodologies

Documents

Large-Scale Knowledge Management Systems Using Plone Technologies - Tom Moroz- Paul Everitt- And Calvin Hendryx-Parker