> I'm just on the way home now from Europython 2009along with some of  
> the rest of the Netsight team. The conference has been massively  
> inspiring, with nearly 100 talks over the three main conference  
> days. A massive thanks to the organising team, who did a great job  
> of both the logistics and social side of the conference, and of  
> course to all the speakers.

> I did two talks this year, one a case study on a project we are  
> currently working on using WSGI and Deliverance to skin a  
> legacy .NET portal entitledLipstick on a Pig. The second was an  
> attempt to try and show how you can use some of the technology used  
> by Zope outside of Zope: in this case a beginners' talk on Zope Page  
> Templates. When I submitted the talk for the Zope page templates,  
> the response from the talks team was 'Great! Finally a Zope talk!'  
> as they hadn't had any yet. Ironically my talk was actually about  
> using Zope stuff *outside* of Zope. I put a call out on twitter  
> urging some more people to submit Zope/Plone talks, but alas it  
> seems not many were forthcoming.

> When I first attended Europython back in 2004, before any of the  
> other frameworks existed, there was actually a dedicated Zope track  
> at the conference, and there were a load of Zope and Plone talks  
> there. It was actually a bit of an odd feeling, as you had a very  
> distinct split in the conference attendees: those (mainly academics)  
> that did hardcore stuff writing python compilers and simulated  
> particle physics; and those people out in 'the commercial world'  
> developing web apps with python in Zope and developing Plone, Silva,  
> etc.

> There was certainly a feeling that those doing Zope work were  
> 'outside' the rest of the python community to a certain degree. This  
> was mainly due to Zope being a trailblazer in terms of what it was  
> doing and hence having to develop quite a lot of its own libraries  
> and practises. Examples of this are libraries such as the DateTime  
> library that Zope had before python had anything similar. I guess in  
> just 'getting things done' some of Zope was maybe not quite as pure  
> as python academics might have wanted, and Zope was a fairly  
> monolithic system with little practical chance for its code to be  
> used outside of Zope.

> As a side note: in one of the keynotes this year Sir Tony Hoare  
> talked about the differences between Scientists and Engineers. The  
> former chasing absolute perfection, validation and proof in an ideal  
> world; the latter concerned with an imperfect world and doing only  
> exactly what is necessary to achieve the specification. This ties in  
> with my feelings above, and it could be said that at that time the  
> Zope people were the engineers and the rest of the python academic  
> community the scientists. But times have moved on.

> A year or so later the 'Zope track' became the 'web framework track'  
> and Django, turbogears, pylons, etc joined in. This year the talks  
> were completely mixed up together with commercial and scientific  
> talks interspersed. This gave the event a much more coherent feel,  
> and has to me been the best, most friendly, most inclusive  
> Europython I've been to. Steve Holden, Chairman of the PSF, said  
> that in his after dinner speech: Python really is about the people.  
> Bruce Eckel had similar feelings in his keynote when he said after a  
> stressful flight and journey to get here he walked into the  
> conference and immediately relaxed with a sigh saying 'Ahhh...  
> python people'.

> I really agree with them and I think that python really is a very  
> friendly environment to work in, both the language itself and the  
> amazing community around it.

> That said, we have a problem...

> Looking at the talk abstractsfor Europython there are 97 talks  
> listed. How talks have the word Plone in the abstract? Zero. How  
> about Grok? Zero. Repoze? Zero. Zope? One. That's my talk I did on  
> using Zope Page Templates outside Zope. Silva? Two.

> C'mon people, this is shocking! Zope and related projects and  
> technologies have nearly completely dropped off the radar at this  
> conference.

> How many talk abstracts mention Django? Thirteen. Turbogears? Two.  
> Pylons? Three.

> Today Zope is a very different thing to what it was back then, with  
> the entire Zope 2 application server being eggified and  
> easy_install'able. The Zope Toolkit (previously known as Zope 3)  
> also a collection of independently usable eggs. Technologies such as  
> the ZODB, Page Templates, and Component Architecture are all usable  
> outside of Zope and can be used in general python work. Projects  
> such as Repoze are splitting things up further and allowing Zope to  
> be used in a WSGI stack and re-using parts of the Zope Toolkit to  
> produce repoze.bfg a lighter weight framework. We have zc.buildout  
> which is an amazing tool for deployment of not just Zope projects,  
> not just python projects, but pretty much anything. Grok, a layer on  
> top of the Zope Toolkit provides a very rapid 'convention rather  
> than configuration' approach to MVC web development, much like Rails  
> does for Ruby.

> But... I don't think the rest of the python community have quite got  
> this yet. Maybe they still see Zope as 'that strange beast from  
> years back', maybe the Zope community concentrates its resources on  
> speaking at other events, e.g. Plone has not only its annual  
> conference this year in Budapest (which has the same order of  
> magnitude of attendees as Europython, but exclusively focussed on  
> Plone) but additionally both a European Symposium and and US  
> Symposium. That is a lot of time people will be spending traveling  
> and attending and talking at events, but I think we really do need  
> to get some more visible presence at wider python community events.  
> We need to make sure the rest of the Python community see all the  
> fantastic code and products that have come out of the Zope world.

> There was a great talk by Martijn Faassen on 'Things I Helped  
> Create'which was a breakneck speed journey through his experience in  
> creativity in general from a small kid to where he is now.  
> Unfortunately he ran out of time before he got really stuck in to  
> all the Zope stuff he has done. It was still a massively  
> enlightening talk. Christian Theune did a tutorial (alas I didn't  
> make the tutorials) on using the ZODB for persisting objects, which  
> would have also made a great talk (or at least lightning talk).

> So this is a call to action. Next year Europython will be back again  
> in the UK, and run to the same fantastic standard it was this year.  
> And I want to make sure that there are more Zope/Plone/Grok/etc  
> talks. Specifically I will be banging the drum come next year and  
> really pushing people to do talks.

> I'm even going to go out on a limb here and propose a starter list  
> of talks:

> Using the ZODB to Persist Objects
> Using buildout to deploy stuff
> The state of Plone
> Introduction to Zope Component Architecture
> Building a Grok app in 15 minutes.
> If you want to find out more about what has been going on at the  
> conference, Reinout van Rees has been doing an excellent job  
> liveblogging the conference.

> Read more…