Thanks everyone for some thoughtful replies. I'm beginning to come round to the view, that perhaps the best way forward is "Integration of best of breed" rather than Plone trying to do everything.
Alex Limi says in the foreward to Martin Aspeli's book .... "Speaking of which, how does the future of Plone look like in 2007? Web development is now in a state we could only have dreamt about five years ago— and the rise of numerous great Python web frameworks, and even non-Python solutions like Ruby on Rails has made it possible for the Plone community to focus on what it excels at: content and document management, multilingual content, and solving real problems for real companies—and having fun in the process. Before these frameworks existed, people would often try to do things with Plone that it was not built or designed to do—and we are very happy that solutions now exist that cater to these audiences, so we can focus on our core expertise. Choice is good, and you should use the right tool for the job at hand." (The full context of that quote is at http://limi.net/articles/foreword-to-professional-plone-development/ ) And of course, it not just about other software platforms anymore. It's about the fact that so much of our world is now represented in datacenters on the Internet. We are interested in connecting services not software. The world seems to be moving towards service orientated architectures (SOA) and using SOAP, REST, ATOM PUB to integrated large blogs of functionality from different platforms. The world of Service Orientated Architecture (SOA) will be a comfortable area for python / zope programmers. It's an object orientated world. The marketing folks are using words like "mashups", "data mashup" and "Business Mashups". If you are new to this world of mashups, then try ..... http://www.serena.com/mashups/tv.html?bcpid=1321279998&bclid=1323277251&bctid=1328185438 (7 minutes) Bear with the sales tone for the first two minutes, it gets better. Sounds like NorthWest One has done some great work on a mashup with SalesForce.com. I see it listed on appexchange.com at .... http://www.salesforce.com/appexchange/detail_overview.jsp?id=a0330000002QFi8AAG Is there are a good "end user case study" of salesforce.com integrated with Plone ? Is any non-profit on this list using this integration ? How is it going ? As Paul Roleand said, the Plone community is an incredibly talented group. I suspect that this team is already very acomplished at mashups. We could all probably benefit from publisizing more widely existing Plone mashup case studies and the opportunities before us. Peter H _______________________________________________ NGO mailing list [email protected] http://lists.plone.org/mailman/listinfo/ngo
