Roberto Allende

Android and Python Software Developer

[en-robertoallende]

11 Slides from DroidCon NYC 2015 - Part 2

In the previous post, I introduced the first five slides I chose from DroidCon NYC 2015. Here is the second part with the remaining ones.

6. Have you seen Cloud Spin?

Bulletproof Android wasn't the only talk that taught us Matrix techniques. In this case, Bret McGowen and Ray Tsang showed us how to use phone cameras to record movies like the Wachowski brothers in The Matrix. To be more specific, do you remember that scene where Trinity jumps to kick a bad guy and when she's in the air, the camera freezes and rotates 180-degrees? Well, if you have 19 Android devices, you can do it too. The camera part, at least...

So, the slide I've chosen from this talk is the engineer schematics of this project called Cloud Spin demo.

Since this talk also has a stand, I'll leave a bonus with this slide, which is myself playing with the spins, but remember, security has to be the number one priority, so guys and gals be sure not to try this at home alone.

  7. Tools of the trade

Talking about tools, Sebastiano Poggi brought a very comprehensive and useful list of tools when writing Android code. The slide I picked from this talk is an obvious one but many times forgotten. So, besides the existence of this tag, it's very common to read "real" text on layouts even when it's for testing purposes.

Sebastiano's reminder, if you want to see how a text looks like in a layout, just use tool:text tag instead of android:text.

  8. How the Main Thread works

More on tools, Michael Bailey from American Express gave a great talk about threads on Android. If you have written code on Android you know how challenging it might be to deal with main thread, background threads and communication mechanisms, so this talk really sheds light on this subject and also gives a list of resources and tools. In fact, the slide I picked from this talk is a screenshot showing Android Trace View, a tool that shows an application stack over time, which might be very helpful to detect code that's blocking the main thread.

  9. What’s New in Android UI Engineering

Back to UI and Layouts, Roman Nurik, Nick Butcher and Chris Banes came with amazing new stuff on Android UI. One of them is the new PercentRelativeLayout. So, if you used to waste a lot of time trying to build responsive UI with LinearLayout, use the new PercentRelativeLayout, and not only will it be easier, but it has a better performance, as well.

  10. Common slides on different talks

There were two slides that got repeated in several talks. The first one worth mentioning was Israel Ferrer's meme "Let me explain you", this became part of the folk of the conference and beyond, so here is the story. Israel was meant to give a talk during Droidcon NYC 2015 but he couldn't make it and he told the organizers in advance, so all the speakers added a slide with an Israel's photo and his favorite phrase: let me explain you.

The second most common slide during the event was perhaps a sign that this is a great moment to be an Android Developer because most of the companies for whom the speakers work are hiring. In fact, the president of the United States, Frank Underwood himself, was doing this job.

  11. Be a Good Citizen: Develop Maintainable Apps

The last slide is from Annyce Davis’ talk about good practices on developing android applications. During the talk, she describes good criteria to choose what to use or not on an Android project. She also talks about testing and very briefly about an application architecture. And this is the slide I chose. “Have you seen this before?”, Annyce asks. "Here we have a snippet from an Activity which contains an animation, chromecast support, fragments and it goes on and on. This code violates the single responsibility principle".

That's it. I've written many classes that violate the single responsibility principle and that's why I felt so bad about it. Ok, I read about Uncle Bob’s clean architecture and some others’ too and I knew there's something really important to work on but I didn’t know the name until I heard Annyce and remembered the single responsibility principle.

This slide leads us to an open discussion, which, if I am lucky enough, I will tell about in next posts. It will be started off by the question: how can we build applications using classes or activities or components which follow a single responsibility principle?  

Do you know the answer? I'll be very glad to know.

References

Have you seen Cloud Spin? - Blog Post.

Tools of the trade - Blog Post.

How the Main Thread works - Android Studio TraceView.

What’s New in Android UI Engineering

Be a Good Citizen: Develop Maintainable Apps

Single Responsibility Principle

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11 Slides from Droidcon NYC 2015

Droidcon NYC 2015 was a great conference with an outstanding program. More than once, it was not easy to choose which session to attend; likewise to choose a slide from a talk but I took the challenge and here is my list. I don't intend to look for the best ones, the mere discussion of the meaning of best could take up several paragraphs, but rather the ones that represent a concept that I can apply to my daily projects or that slide that stuck in my mind after the talk was over.

1. Android is the World Phone  

Corey Latislaw begins the first conference keynote showing why Android is the most popular operating system in the world and how rapidly it is growing, and goes on to focus on the meaning and the challenges of this.

There are many good ideas, initiatives and sentences to quote from this talk such as "Mobile devices are changing the world one person and app at a time" or "I am passionate about Android because it is accessible to the world over not just the richest in our society." But the slide I take from this talk is the one that shows that being the world phone is not just a business discussion but also has a deep impact on many software requirements, including connectivity. 

"Unlimited Data is a Lie". This is a strong sentence to say out loud to an audience of mobile developers. However, context is crucial here. Corey isn't complaining about carrier providers but what developers can do to overcome to this issue. 

2. Creating Offline Mobile Apps that Always Work

William Hoang gave a talk and a tutorial explaining exactly how to solve the issue Corey Latislaw pointed out, so my second pick is not exactly a slide but a Github page. A well documented line of code is worth a thousand pictures, right?

During the tutorial we added offline support to a simple todo list application. I was surprised how simple CoachDB was and I definitely added it to my set of tools.

3. Think Like an Animator 

There were a good number of talks about User Interface during Droidconf NYC 2015 and if one of them comes with a trailer, you can expect something really exceptional. Truth is Zack Sultan and Kevin Grant's talk was amazing. 

One of the things I liked most about this talk was the comparison between animation techniques in the movie industry and its evolution with the current state of animation on mobile platforms. 

Using animation as a user experience tool is definitely not a new idea; however, bringing already existing knowledge to the table can make a huge contribution to better understanding how and even why we add animations to our user interfaces.

So, the third slide is about the book The Illusion of Life by Ollie Johnston and Frank Thomas. 

I won't tell you any more about this talk to avoid spoilers. I'll just point out that if you have a chance to watch it, don't miss it.

4. A Pirate’s Guidelines for Android

After a talk about animation where Walt Disney was one of the main characters, I am sure the next thing that comes to mind is Pirates, otherwise let's assume it was a creative way to link both talks because discussing Lisa Neigut's creative talk really needs a touch of imagination. Every developer has at some time wondered "How Do I start an Android App?" Lisa answers this question by bringing deep lessons already known on Pirate culture and it couldn't be a better source of wisdom because developers and pirates are, after all, code people. Back to my slide choices. My pick from this talk is the one that said: "Fragments are not simple. Don't use fragments".

Even if I read Pierre-Yves Ricau's "Advocating Against Android Fragments" and the whole discussion on that post, I must confess that this slide really created a new existential problem for me and I kept wondering whether this may not be the price of all the wisdom that came with the talk.  

5. Bulletproof Android

So far I have always thought that 'reading the matrix' was a Hollywood invented skill but Godfrey Nolan proved that it's not fiction. He showed us how we can learn this and other superpowers. The slide from this talk is about something I am sure you always felt was possible but which you would never get to do: Decompile an Android application. 

So far I have always thought that 'reading the matrix' was a Hollywood invented skill but Godfrey proved that it's not fiction. He showed us how we can learn this and other superpowers. The slide from this talk is about something I am sure you always felt was possible but which you would never get to do: Decompile an Android application. 

I am sure this is not a fair choice of slide because decompiling an application was just an introductory slide to the talk and most of the talk was about the risks of having certain information on source code. But considering that the first thing I did when I got home was to decompile a couple of applications available on the market just to learn from them, I've chosen this slide. Fortunately, Godfrey's written a number of books that will allow me to catch up on all the security stuff he talked about, such as Bulletproof Android, Android Best Practices, Decompiling Android and Decompiling Java. 

To be continued

If you want to know what the next 6 ones are, stay tuned. In the meantime, feel free to share which your favorite one was.

Updates

Oct 27th: I just published part 2. Read it here.

References

Android is the World Phone

Creating Offline Mobile Apps that Always Work - Tutorial

Think Like an Animator's trailer - Stop motion capture

A Pirate’s Guidelines for Android - Sketchnotes by Siena Aguayo

Bulletproof Android - Top 10 Mobile risks

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How to use a RSS in Google App Engine

I wanted to solve a very simple problem using python, consume a RSS from a third party web site, process it and show the result in my Google App Engine application. 

Recipe

Ingredients

Python 2.7

Google App Engine 1.9.1

Step 1

Create a directory for your project and inside of it, create a directory called lib with an empty file called __init__.py

Step 2

Download feedparser package from PyPi. Extract the package in a temporary folder, look for the files feedparser.py and sgmlib3.py and copy them inside of your project's lib directory.

Step 3

Now you're ready to use the feedparser library inside your project, so create the app.yaml file and your python module as usual. In this case the magic lines are:

from lib import feedparser

URL = 'https://www.youtube.com/rss/user/VEVO/feed.rss'

d = feedparser.parse(URL)

Sample Working Application

You can download a working sample application from my GitHub repository.

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Global Teambuilding

I joined the Technology Entrepreneurship class by Professor Chuck Eesley at Stanford University through Venture-lab.org few weeks ago. The class requires to create a team to work on assignments similar as the tasks a real startup needs to do on its inital phases.

Udacity, Coursera and Venture-Lab are making possible to thousands of people to attend classes from prestigious universities such as Stanford, Yale, University of Michigan, Georgia Tech and University of Pennsylvania among many others.

I joined Technology Entrepreneurship class by Professor Chuck Eesley at Stanford University few weeks ago, and besided the recorded lectures, the class requires to accomplish grupal assignments. For such assignments you have to create a team. The team will do excercises very similar as a the tasks a Startup have to do on its initial stages.

At the moment of teambuilding I decided to try two ideas I had on my head for a while:

1. Once I finished the Gamification course by Kevin Werbach at Coursera, I began to wonder if gamification could be used in conjunction with personal management techniques such as Getting Things Done. I use Remember The Milkdaily and i really miss a progress bar and other features that might bring gamification.

Exploring such idea i found John Guerrera's talk "Goals Become Games: Gamification for High Achievers", there he describes a handmade way to gamify his goals and tasks with posticks, which might not be implemented on software yet.

So once you meet the need, a potential solution and people willing to work on a project, next thing you think is "why not ?".

2. As Kathleen Eisenhardt states on Ecorner at Stanford, Three to Five is typically the right number for a founding team. In my experience that's true, no discussion. In fact she says that if the founding team has more than five, you spend the time trying to manage it and you've too many opinions. But since the class is not exactly a startup and considering this is a global class with thousand of students, so it is not a class in a traditional way, why not to challenge such idea ?, why not to use some lessons learned on many Open Source projects and build a larger team ?.

The results so far

The first one, the Gamified Goal and Task Management team has 14 active members so far. How to organize the team ?, here is a first approach.

Last friday the team met the first milestone, to turn a bad idea into a good one. We had to choose bad business ideas from a previous assignment list and work on it to turn into a good one and produce a commercial for it.

In a outstanding perfomance, Sperrer Hajijah working in Austria and Brian Shaw from United States made very important contributions and the team were able to reach the deadline. The video is here.

Ok, real milestones are the ones to come. But so far, what do you think about big groups on global classes ? do you think the team framework makes sense ?

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Just a week for Plone Symposium South America 2011

Piggybacked with PyCon Brazil, PSSA 2011 promises to be the best PSSA ever!

Just read the schedule, 16 talks with most of the hot topics on Plone community: Diazo, Dexterity, Transmogrifier, Scalability, Caching, development tools for Plone, success stories, etc. Same with speakers, we'll have developers comming from Argentina, Brazil, United States and more.

But the best is for the end, on October 1st, Python and Plone community will have the first "Caipirinha with ZopeSprint". During that day, we'll work to migrate ZTK components to Python 3 and to integrate webob With Zope.

You're invited, see you on Sao Paulo!

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ZodbBrowser released!

Have you ever dream with a tool to inspect and take advantage of python's introspection power on Zope2's ZODB objects ?. No need to dream anymore, such tool exists and you can download it from your favorite Python Package repository.

During Python Argentina Camp 2010 (PyCamp) i started to work on a set of tools with the aim to make Zope2 developer life easier. The first of those is a ZodbBrowser. On that time the idea was to build something like:

Right now ZodbBrowser let's you browse the whole ZODB content tree and for every object you can get:

Its class and ancestors source code.

Its attributes values and callables source code

Its Interface class source code

These are the features included on the 0.1 experimental version release. Although there are many fixes and improvements to do, there's a minimal set of features working enough to go ahead with a experimental version for testing and to get feedback from community.

Watch it working

Check out the demo video in Youtube.

Try it!

If you already have a buildout for Zope2.13 or Plone4 running, edit buildout.cfg to add zope2.zodbbrowser to eggs and zcml sections at buildout and instance parts respectively.

[buildout] ... eggs = zope2.zodbbrowser ... [instance] ... zcml = zope2.zodbbrowser

Then run bin/buildout to make the changes effective. To access zodbbrowser add /zodbbrowser in your zope instance url, for example: http://localhost:8080/zodbbrowser.

Acknowledgments

ZodbBrowser wouldn't be possible without the support and help of Python and Plone Community, PyCamp and the2nd Plone Symposium South America, where it was held the last sprint and i attended to Steve McMahon's JQuery training where i got the "magic knowledge" to get this idea working.

Feedback and issues

If you find an issue you can report it at http://code.google.com/p/zodbbrowser. As always, comments, ideas and questions are very welcome!.

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What about a developer kit for Plone or Zope 2.12 ?

I've been working on a new application made with Zope 2.12, ZTK and Five; once again i become impressed by how powerful Zope is...

After a short experience making projects with Django and Pylons, and even if Zope was conceived before the Agile-era, i still believe Zope's approach is a good way to develop web applications. However, i'm not saying there's no place for improvements, in fact this post aspires to become a 'what if...' one.

When i was working on this new application (to be published soon), i was following several documentation, including Zope Book. Reading the Zope Book i had the feeling ZMI was a great tool to accomplish tasks TTW. If I'm not wrong, that was the idea on the beginning, ie to develop ttw. During last years, with Zope3, Five and so on, Zope development became more through the file system and although ZMI may be a great tool for system administration/maintenance, and considering also there are third party products to assist developers, specially in Plone such as clouseau, gloworm. Sometimes i remember my sources as developer (ie Smalltalk) and i miss a good set of tools to assist me.

The tools i'm talking about might be at least:

System or Class Browser (see example here)

ZODB Browser

ZTK Component Browser (ie something to see in Zope a list of registered components, utilities, viewlet managers and so on)

Let's do it

Why not ?.

During next 3 days it's going to be held Python Argentina (PyAr) Camp (aka PyCamp) in Veronica, Buenos Aires, and I plan to work on this idea. I don't pretend to do anything new necessarily. I'm already aware there are products that offers some of the features of the case, so the first thing to do is to research and take a look at them (Friday morning). In the best case, the job to be done might turn these tasks into documentation and defining a couple of howto as deliverable or deliverables might be a long todolist as a worst case. I'm not to ambitious neither, you can't do magic in just one weekend but my plans is to have a deliverable for this Sunday so, if you have any suggestion, advice, comment, do or don'ts, ideas, inspiration-source or anything else i'd appreciate a lot you share them in a comment here. Also if you're interested to join on this crazy crusade, we're going to meet at #pyar channel at irc.freenode.net during next 3 days.

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World Plone Day 2011 Call for Champion

Would you like to be the champion of one of the most exciting events oriented to promote Plone Worldwide ?. Do you enjoy to think global and act local ?, here's your call.

After three editions working on World Plone Day, I decided it's time to handover the challenge. If You're a person who likes to think global and act local, have new ideas about global Plone promotion, just have time or You like to get fun promoting Plone, this call is for You.

Organizing WPD is simpler than you imagine. The most difficult part of the job is to agree a good date suitable for most members of community. Once you get that, You must remember dates, keep track of local hosts, promote the event, make a list of the hosts and so on. If this sounds hard, don't worry, most of the job have reusable material and it's public available at http://www.coactivate.org/projects/plone-marketing/project-home (see bottom WPD).

How to Apply

Simple, send me a mail to rallende at menttes dot com and answer:

Why you want to be the WPD Champion,

What are your plans for WPD

Proposals will be received until October 17th.

Why am I making the change

Organizing World Plone Day is a great experience and I believe it really worth to share it. Also, there are new activities to promote Plone that I want to try so i've to make choices, but if no one is interested, don't worry I'm going to keep moving WPD forward until I find someone or We don't have at least one host with at least one speaker and one person listen to him/her :).

As a WPD Champion You're going to meet and get the support of many awesome people, don't miss the opportunity, You only have to send a mail to start the adventure.

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Projections for Plone Symposium South America

Since the beginning 2010 We are collecting data through a Survey about Plone Symposium South America (PSSA) 2010 attendees criteria and preferences. PSSA is a regional event to be held in Cordoba, Argentina during November 22th until 28th 2010.

In this post We share some partial data and We invite you to come and also tell your preferences, the survey will remain open.

Potential attendees residence

Although PSSA is a Sotuh American regional event, many people from other regions answered and showed their interest to come. We're planning to have talks and activities in Spanish, Portuguese and English. Speaking Spanish is not a must to come and enjoy PSSA.

Argentina 27%

Brazil 23%

United States 10%

Venezuela 10%

Spain 7%

Netherlands 7%

Mexico 7%

Others 9%

Plone Experience

During last years, Plone Community had grown in South America. We had very big and important projects, students takin part on core development programs such as Google Summer of Code and recently, the first Plone book written in the region had been published. This grow may be reflectted on potential attendees' experience:

Advanced Developer 31%

New Developer 19%

New User 12%

Advanced User 12%

System Administrator 11%

Core Developer 8%

Others 7%

Preferred topics

If technical level grows, so do they topics preferences, moving to more advanced ones.

System Administrator 23,3%

Framework 23,3%

Integration with other techs 26,7%

Success Stories 6,7%

New Features 10,0%

Others 10,0%

Survey still open, You are invited to answer and come to Cordoba

These results are not closed yet, the survey will remain open, so you can let us know your preferences. If you're planning to come, please take five minutes to share your opinion and help us make the best PSSA ever. The survey is available at http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/pssa2010. And of course, You are invited to follow news and updates about the Symposium at http://plonesymposium.com.ar

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WPD Experiences from Sao Paulo, Brazil

As a part of the WPD experience sharing interview, Erico Andrei from Simples Consultoria tells his experiences organizing the WPD editions in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

In which WPD event did you take part as a local host and what kind of activities did you do?

Our company organized the Sao Paulo WPD editions for 2008 and 2009. On the first edition we used a usual approach hosting the event in a hotel and inviting few customers and prospects. Talks were all streamed on UStream.tv, which gave us an amazing response and mindshare -- we had guys like Sidnei da Silva interacting online, bringing the event to a whole new level.

For the 2009 event we decided to pursue a different way. We chose to host the event in on our offices and to give a Plone site to a NGO. The event was all about building the site from ground up and interacting with the community through ustream and irc.

What strategy did you use to meet with people from these sectors?

On 2008 we basically invited customers and prospects that were close to us at the time.

On 2009 we decided to focus on NGO's to hava a focus. 

How much effort is needed to be a WPD local host?

It depends. On our experience, both times we put a lot of effort in order to make things happen. We, basically, spent 2 or 3 full company days in preparing and hosting WPD.

And what about the results?

The results paid the efforts, for sure. Just to mention, one of the deals WPD2008 helped us to close turned to be our biggest customer on 2009.

In your experience, do you think you have a distinctive characteristic that may be of interest to the rest of the hosts?

We try, every year to make it different. Simples Consultoria is located at the largest city in Brazil and on any given day the city hosts a dozen or so IT-related events, so we really need to avoid doing the same as Oracle, Microsoft and IBM do or no one will pick our event.

What are your plans for wpd 2010?

We are still brainstorming what to do, but we will have another edition of WPD in Sao Paulo.

Watch photos from WPD Sao Paulo here.  If you've been a WPD host, you're invited to share your experiences as well. Answer these questions or make comments in your blog or just send them to me through mail at rover at menttes dot com.

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Experiences as a WPD local host

With fewer than 90 days to go for World Plone Day, I share experiences on former events and invite you to do the same.

In which WPD event did you take part as a local host and what kind of activities did you do?

In both, 2008 and 2009. In 2008 we held several simultaneous events, in Buenos Aires, in Cordoba and in Salta, and in 2009 we went to the city of La Rioja. What audience did the initiatives target? We mainly targeted the government and developers.

What strategy did you use to meet with people from these sectors?

For developers we organized talks in universities. At the National University of Cordoba, Emanuel Sartor gave an introductory talk on Plone. At the University of Buenos Aires, I gave an introductory course, for example. Other sites were free software events. In 2008 and 2009 events were held in Argentina that coincided with the WPD date and which were large spaces for dissemination. In the case of government, the strategy remained the same, to knock at the government’s door and ask them if they were interested in receiving a free talk from Plone. In 2008 we were able to do this at the Ministry of Planning of the Nation.

How much effort is needed to be a WPD local host?

It really depends a lot on what you want to do. Rather than think how much effort it takes, I guess it is better to consider how much effort I can put into it and plan on the basis of that. In giving a talk or demo in an organization, a minimum of effort is involved. NGOs and the government tend to encourage these kinds of activities. One can also organize one’s own event – renting the hall, printing the brochures – and it’s really interesting. But not always necessary.

And what about the results?

Our WPD initiatives were done with sponsorship from Menttes. In the case of the government we wanted to generate new projects and within the developers audience we wanted to contact potential collaborators. I believe we were successful with both audiences. And the effort involved was small when compared to other initiatives that gained the same results.

In your experience, do you think you have a distinctive characteristic that may be of interest to the rest of the hosts?

What I think may be interesting is how we administer our efforts. When one thinks of an event, one normally starts by worrying about the logistics: the venue, the talks, the catering, etc. When in fact what is central is promoting the event. In our case we made the greatest effort in disseminating the initiatives and organizing many small ones. The logistics we got from third parties interested in learning about Plone and all our organizational effort was directed primarily towards making the day, venue and program of the event known.

What are your plans for WPD 2010?

We want to organize a single event and bring together the local community in order to strengthen the bond with colleagues. In the second semester of this year, a South American Plone Symposium will be held in Cordoba and we plan to start visualizing how we want the event to develop.

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Quick and easy Plone theming with XDV

Testing new stuff.

Plone is evolving. Future versions will support new and very easy ways to customize different part of the CMS. XDV is one of them, as a result of the maturity of deliverance, XDV let's you use a static set of resources as Plone theme using xpath rules. If that sounds awkward, believe me, describing is harder than do it.

At the end of Plone's theming documentation, the author encourages you to try it, after all "the best way to learn is by doing". At that point i found the approach easy enough give it a try and even if i'm kinda reluctant to explore new ways of doing certain tasks, i was very curious to test if XDV promises were true. I didn't spend to much time looking for a design, and i just picked the first one among a list of four:

Invention

Bittersweet

Nonzero

Transparentia

xdvtheme.inventions

The idea behind XDV is very simple, you put a facade in front of Plone. That facade, named theme, is built with a set of static htmls, css and js and it is wired with Plone by a set of rules that maps Plone's original skin with the theme.

Invention a two-column layout theme, is very simple and so the rules required to do the job, all you have to do is write a list of rules and voila, you get Inventions working in Plone.

  In my case, i decided to modify the CSS because i wanted to clear the code a little bit. Although it wasn't necessary at all, sometimes it is easier to modify the theme's css than writing a rule, if the code is under your control you might do this, but that's not always the case as i knew from a Matt Hamilton's talk, where he uses deliverance to integrate a .net portal, Plone and Moodle.

The rules are stored in a file called rules.xml. In this case i need just 5 rules, one for the title, content, global navigation, right column and the last one to remove images in portlets, respectively:

<rules xmlns="http://openplans.org/deliverance">     <!-- title -->     <replace content='/html/head/title'                   theme='/html/head/title' />     <!-- content area -->     <copy content='//*[@id="content"]'                   theme='//*[@id="leftcolumn"]' />     <copy content='//*[@id="portal-globalnav"]'             theme='//*[@id="links"]' />     <!-- Portlets -->    <copy content='//*[@id="portal-column-two"]'          theme='//*[@id="rightcolumn"]' />    <drop content='//*/dl/dd/a/img' /> </rules>

There are five kind rules: copy, replace, drop, prepend and append. Combining them with XPath expressions you manipulate each element and merge both themes. They're not very hard constructions and you can use two tools to make the job even easier. The first one is firebug, firebug let's you select an element and get the Xpath construction. The other one is banjo, following a post by Nate Aune:

"Banjo is a web-based tool which loads in the browser. The browser window is divided into three panes: one pane that loads the Plone site, one pane that loads the theme, and one pane that we’re calling the control panel. You simply click on the element in your Plone site, and then click on the corresponding element in your theme to “map” these elements together. The resulting mappings are written out as rules in the rules.xml file, which is used by Deliverance to insert Plone’s HTML in the proper placeholder in the theme’s HTML".

Performance

When I got the inventions theme working and I started to test it, I found it very fast. How fast ?, let's see some tests made at home. The first one was against my predictions. Using apache's benchmark tool i got:

So, using xdvtheme.inventions, the transfer rate is nearly the half than the default skin. It seems my machine needs more time to apply the rules, and even if xdvtheme.inventions requires to transfer half of data, 12,98Kb against 23,05Kb, the result favors to Plone's default skin since it takes 242ms against 270ms. Then, from  server side, default approach seems to be better.

Although the results I got with ab, I still found inventions faster in my browser. The key here seems to be that variable ab calls document length. Using YSlow I compared time to load the home page, data being transfered in kilobytes and per components.

Quick thought: length matters. Even paying the price at server side, Plone's default skin takes 3 times more to get loaded in Firefox 3.5. It requires more than 100Kb of Javascript, where i had no need to use js in inventions.

This remind me a talk gave by Joel Burton in Naples, where he started saying Plone is not slow, it just performs to many tasks. And I find these simple comparisons supporting that idea because we're comparing a general purpose skin, elastic, with editor and multiple layout support against a fixed-layout one, no edition support and it covers a very particular case. Anyway, if you don't need such general purpose solution for certain scenarios, now there's an alternative and it's easier and more flexible than existing approaches.

Testing, feedback welcome

xdvtheme.inventions runs with Plone 3.3rc5, it requires collective.xdv and a web server or Products.Reflecto to make available the static content. If you want to try it, just run:

$svn co http://svn.plone.org/svn/collective/xdvtheme.inventions/trunk/ themes

and then just follow readme.txt's instructions. Any comment, question or feedback is always welcome.

Resources

Lipstick on a Pig, Matt Hamilton's talk. Slides with audio.

Theming Plone with XDV - Limi's tutorial to get started with xdv.

collective.xdv package documentation at pypi

Banjo, creating deliverance/xdv rules TTW - Blog post and video, by Nate and friends.

Deliverance Project

Deliverance Demo and Deliverance Tutorial efforts at Sorrento Sprint - another implmentation for inventions, in this case using deliverance, i found this example after i  finished xdvtheme.inventions.

Products.Reflecto - a tool to incorporate part of the file system into a Plone site by Jarn.

Apache Benchmarking tool

YSlow - performance benchmarking tool by yahoo

Plone Users mailing list - thanks to Jon Stahl for the Reflecto tip

Menttes' team

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Happy Plone Day!

World Plone Day is running in 45 cities around the world.

The second edition of World Plone Day is here. Becase the we decided to change the date from second semester to the first, Plone community had less than 6 months to setup a worldwide event and even such constraint we've a very succefull edition.

If it is not clear why we call WPD as 'a follow the sun event' you can red the World Plone Day twitter account and check how the post are being entered according the sun was giving the light to our Planet.

World Plone Day, a web 2.0 event

You can follow WPD2009 through the web at twitter, delicious, flickr and facebook. Just check the urls at worldploneday.org or look for our web2.0 tag: wpd2009.

Thanks again

Plone community is awesome, watching so many people working in the same idea at the same day, no matter the place, religion or belief, gives us and incredible energy. Thanks all the people who is supporting World Plone Day 2009.

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See you in PyCon 2009, Chicago, USA

Thanks to Kamon Ayeva, who invited me to join his talk, and Python Foundation's support, I'll be able to attend to PyCon 2009 to be held in Chicago, USA, since March 25th until April 2nd. The convention has an important list of activities to be part of and don't miss any of them.

Plone at PyCon 2009

Some of the talks that i won't miss are the ones related with Plone:

Plone in the Cloud : an on-demand CMS hosted on Amazon EC2 by Nate Aune

A winning combination: Plone as a CMS, your favorite Python web framework as a frontend by Carlos de la Guardia

Giving back and helping expand the Python community. A roadmap for South America and Africa. by Kamon Ayeva and Roberto Allende

Non Plone talks to attend

After a quick read, i found some others that i would like to attend:

Python 2.6 and 3.0 compatibility by Lennart Regebro

Metaprogramming with Decorators and Metaclasses by Bruce Eckel

Designing a web framework: Django's design decisions Jacob Kaplan-Moss

The schedulle shows great content, too many that i'll be hard to decide. So if you've any suggestion, just let me know

Evangelism and PyCon

Members of the Plone Evangelism and Marketing teams are talking to join Python evangelization efforts. One way to do that it could be to work in a Evangelism Sprint. Andrew M Kuchling is opening PyCon with a pure evangelism talk called How to Give a Python Talk and members of Python community are making a great job promoting Python, so i believe PyCon could be a great opportunity to join effort and look forward to work on new initiatives in the near future.

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World Plone Day 2009 moves forward

Members of Plone Evangelism met at irc.freenode.net to talk about WPD 2008 and 2009.

As published on the mailing list the agenda, we met to talk about WPD 2008 and 2009 editions. The complete log of the meeting is available here.

World Plone Day 2008

Schlepp wrote a very nice post morten report and during the meeting we approved it as the official one.

Since Donna Snow asked for formats worked for various events and how people drew more attendees, we discussed about it. Few words about it:

Bristol and Pisa ran at the university and they were focused to students mainly

Enfold targeted to companies, and its agenda seemed really nice

According their feedback, most of the attendees in these sites knew about Plone already. So the question was how to meet new people. Regarding this, i told about our experience in Argentina. We didn't met as much people as Brazilia, who mets more than hundred of people, but we had a high percentage of people who made a first contact with Plone. The idea is to organize the WPD with organizations that are interested on learn about Plone. We offer them to provide the talks, four hour Plone user's course for free, and we ask them to provide a place, computers if needed and to invite related organizations. So, we gave a talk in argentinian's National Planning Ministry, a talk in a University, two user course in universities and a talk in a Free Software Convention. Plone Cono Sur usually promotes Plone following this approach in a regular basis. It usually helps to meet new people, it doesn't require to much effort and we focus just on the content.

World Plone Day 2008 was a great event, just watch the photos at Flickr, the slides at Slideshare and the locations atGoogle Maps.

WPD 2009 global organization

Regarding  WPD 2009 there's no much to say but I asked for feedback about the event itself, the way the global team is organized and if it is good idea to meet again to keep talking about WPD 2009.

Bonus: Plone Eastern Europe

At the end of the meeting, ree gave a great news, the announcement of a new user group for Eastern Europe, the new group was created to:

publicize the Budapest conference, and the participation grants

on the long term, use this to organize consortia for EU proposals, since these countries are desired in joint projects and the more countries are the more chance for winning.

Altogether it will boost integration of developers and users from this country to the Plone community and global ecosystem.  Congratulations to ree and all the Plone community from Eastern Europe!

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Content Mirror and Pylons

I was experimenting with Pylons and Content Mirror. The result, a proof of concept product called Plyne.

Following posts from Carlos De La Guardia and Kapil Thangavelu (aka hazmat) i started to play with ContentMirror. ContentMirror serializes content from a Plone site to a relational database. Once the Plone content is in a relational database, it is possible to write a small application to consume those data. The result, a lightweight  alternative for Plone deployment. In my case i wanted to use Pylons and i was surprised how easy was everything.

According documentation, Content Mirror supports MySql and Postgresql at least, but I'm too lazy to setup a relational database, so i started using sqlite. Anyway my laziness goes beyond that, I even wanted not to think how to do that and i found a document at eletztrick.de with the lines to setup ContentMirror and Sqlite. Cool!.

Following those very simple steps, i got Plone's content in a relational database. The generated tables are very intuitive. For example, in a Plone default's site you'll get something like:

table|content|content|3|CREATE TABLE content (         content_id INTEGER NOT NULL,         id VARCHAR(256) NOT NULL,         uid VARCHAR(36) NOT NULL,         portal_type VARCHAR(64),         status VARCHAR(64),         type VARCHAR(64),         container_id INTEGER,         title TEXT,         description TEXT,         subject TEXT,         location TEXT,         contributors TEXT,         creators TEXT,         creation_date TIMESTAMP,         modification_date TIMESTAMP,         effectivedate TIMESTAMP,         expirationdate TIMESTAMP,         language TEXT,         rights TEXT,         PRIMARY KEY (content_id),          FOREIGN KEY(container_id) REFERENCES content (content_id) ) ..... table|atdocument|atdocument|22|CREATE TABLE atdocument (     content_id INTEGER NOT NULL,     text TEXT,     presentation BOOLEAN,     tablecontents BOOLEAN,     PRIMARY KEY (content_id),      FOREIGN KEY(content_id) REFERENCES content (content_id) ON DELETE CASCADE )

  Just to show two of them. The complete SQL is available here. That's a default Plone site, Content Mirror also supports custom archetypes but I haven't test that yet. Using those tables we dump the database. Here's available a dump for sqlite3.

Regarding the Pylons app... there's not much to say, but it is a proof of concept project, some lines aren't very nice but my idea was to test what is possible to do in a couple of hours and it works(tm). The result is available here. 

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One day left for World Plone Day

After six month of hard work, the WPD is here.

Everything started with a simple mail in the Plone Evangelism mailing list. The idea was to promote Plone on a global scale. Now, with only one day left to the first Plone World Day, we are happy to say that we are expecting more than 2000 attendees in meetings all over the world. This fantastic event is a testimony of the enthousiasm of the Plone community, and I would like to thank all the people who have supported it right from the start. It wouldn't have been possible without all of you!

Just few words before the WPD begins:

Remember to show your pride of being part of this awesome community

Take photos, and upload them to flickr (our wpd-web2.0 champion can give you details about it)

Count how many people attend to your local event and let us know that number!

The energy and enthusiasm of the Plone community is awesome. You guys and gals rock!