e-commerce sprint, zürich

Ancron invited us to sprint on PloneMall. We met at the office of Alliance Partner Peter Holzer (Agitator) in Zürich. Phil Auersperg, Jens Klein and Robert Niederreiter joined the sprint.

E-commerce has a long story at BlueDynamics. PloneMall was designed by Jens while Phil made ArchGenXML work to generate the fancy models. PloneMall is used live, its stable, secure and technical its modularization is fine.

But its design targets the world of Plone 2.x. Checkout process is slow because to much stuff is Archetypes based: many objects are involved. Loading one Archetype based object is fine, loading a whole stack slows down Zope and Plone. For a buyer this means slow checkouts and sellers need more hardware than usual.

Phil brought PloneMall to Plone 3.x in the last months. This is the first step. It works again!

Now we're at the world of zope3 component architecture. Other people picked up the e-commerce story and created projects with names like GetPaid and EasyShop.

On the first day - yesterday - we defined the requirements. Daniel has its own vision of e-commerce and BlueDynamics provided tons of use-cases.

Today we're on evaluation of existing projects. We don't want to reinvent the wheel, on the other hand code must fit in the technical-strategic plan of BlueDynamics. Here quality, dependencies, experience and community are major criteria.

Plan for tomorrow: A roadmap - the story of e-commerce from our point of view in a plone 3/ zope3 world.