Paul Everitt The Baby and the Bathwater: Fast Understandable Sorta-Plone

A talk at Plone Symposium East 2009. Track A, 11am, May 29.

Plone gives a well-designed, out-of-the-box product for specific applications, backed by a large ecosystem. If what you need fits in Plone's bulls-eye, you're set. But when you need a different application or high performance, "fighting the framework" takes over and frustration can mount.

In this talk we look at KARL, a large-scale "knowledge management" project for the Open Society Institute. KARL started as a Plone application with FrankenPlone changes to its architecture. After fighting the framework, a switch was made to use the technologies of Zope combined with well-known packages from Python and WSGI. By removing most of the framework, KARL gained much faster performance, reliabiliy, and simplicity.

The talk will provide:

a. Background on the project
b. Demonstration of the result and load testing numbers
c. Discussion of the architectural decisions and tradeoffs