Martin Aspeli wrote:
Dylan Jay wrote:
I think there are two ways to look at this:
1. You can't find good developers because no-one wants to do Plone
work.
2. You can't find good developers because Plone is growing and
everyone is
busy.
If you look at plone.net, there are over 250 companies that offer Plone
services. I don't think that's a sign of weakness.
Not weakness now but potentially in the future. I think there a lots
of companies using plone because they have settled on the best
technology available, ie Plone. It delivers. We all know that.
I wasn't talking about companies using Plone (there are many more of
those); I was talking about companies offering Plone services.
So was I.
But my argument is that if all the fresh blood is doing into
ruby/django/drupal then they will be reinventing the wheel there
instead of discovering Plone and improving it.
Sure, that could happen, and it would be unfortunate.
Plone is never going to beat PHP for attracting college kids who want
to put
together a quick dynamic website (not that this is all PHP is good
for, of
course). That's not necessarily a bad thing, though. Most people who buy
Plone services also want to deal with professionals with some
experience. I
think Plone has a place in the market for skills and investment, and
it does
reasonably well there.
Professionals all started as collage kids. And many professionals are
hobbiests who want to play with technology in their spare time at
first, but that soon terns into a serious skill and that turns into
contributing to the community or offering their services to others.
These are the people we want to attract. These are the people who will
use google app engine and django to create some play apps. Or use
drupal and start telling everyone who extensible and powerful it is.
and then convince their corporate IT to use drupal for their intranet.
For these reasons I think we can't be too arrogant about what kind of
developers we attract and how many.
I certainly don't think we should be arrogant. But I'm not sure you've
captured the whole market with this analogy. People who make technology
decisions usually make them based on more than what they happen to have
tinkered with. They look at things like track record, scalability,
availability of support and feature sets. By your argument, no-one would
be building applications on J2EE. ;-)
They make those decisions on either coolness or availability of
resources IMO. Thats a big simplification I know. J2EE is popular
because you can get java developers and you can get java developers
because its a good career choice for a developer to learn. It's a
chicken and egg thing. But where do new technologies come from? They get
created and then get a buzz because they are cool. They are easy to
learn and very functional, productive or whatever. (or microsoft creates
them and so you know you can get a job if you learn it)
Imagine grok becoming the new rails and by learning grok you learn most
of what you need to customise plone sites. Thats a nice aim.
I noticed in the summit summary some words about hosting. I think this
is pretty important for attracting developers and we can do more in
that area. I don't think any action items got created for this.
See http://dev.plone.org/plone/ticket/7837
static html deployment is one option. but it cuts all the dynamic nature
of plone away. It would be fine for people who just want a simple site
but not of interest to developers who want to get dirty with customising.
I was thinking about how easy we could make plone deployment.
What is it people want to know? How easy is it going to be and how
cheap is it. With VPS prices coming down you can host a few plone
sites for $20 a month.
I don't think that's viable, unfortunately. You're looking at more like
$100 a month for something that can serve a moderate site. That's still
cheap, of course.
Not true. Rails has created this ecosystem of xen based VPS providers. I
use slicehost.com for instance but theres highspeedrails.com and plenty
of others. For $20 I get 256RAM and ubuntu with full root access. Thats
plenty.
You just have to
- learn some unix admin.
- and find a VPS hoster.
- work out how much memory you need
- and setup a buildout on your machine
- and put your code in svn
You don't need this, of course.
- and deploy it to the server
- and then buildout on the server and then run.
Buildout is awsesome and that is so much less than it used to be. but
can we do more?
See the link above.
Can we make google app engine experience that will work on an
ecosystem of VPS hosters?
I kind of doubt it. But then, I'm not sure I agree that this is such a
hugely important factory. Deployment could be simplified, for sure, but
I'm not sure that's where it hurts the most, by any stretch.
learning curve is the biggest problem I think we all aggree. but part of
the learning curve is getting a functional site on the web as well as
customizing. Maybe all thats needed is a really good tutorial. Perhaps
thats a good weekend task for me. "how to get a live plone site in 10min"
We need a server builder.
Do we? :)
glad it got someone else thinking about it :)
Download an installer. It runs the buildout builder and then the
server builder. Pick from a list of supported Ihosting companies. Hit
"go" and you have a complete development environment and deployment
environment all setup for you.
Just an idea.
I think that'd be cool, but realistically, that's going to take a *lot*
of setup and relationships with hosting providers. I also think that for
serious sites, people are going to want something more bespoke over
which they have more control.
actually we don't need to list of hosters. All we really need is some
very simple instructions on what to do with a brand new ubuntu install
to get plone up live. We almost have that with zopeskel and buildout. I
just wonder if we can do more to connect your development environment to
your hosting enviroment.
I'll write my tutorial this weekend and we'll see what we can simplify :)
Martin
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