Thursday in Italia

Reed and I have gotten int he habit of getting breakfast at this little place a block from City of Science. They don't know any English, our Italian is weak, but they serve great coffee, yummy pastries, and are very friendly.

Geek Speak
The Plone keynote speech was given by Alexander Limi and Paul Runyon, the founders of Plone. The state of Plone is very interesting, and the dynamic is compelling. Plone is about democracy and power, and the state of things is that the economy for it is exploding. Also, the push of Plone towards a better component based architecture is really making it a more dynamic yet better performing system. Very interesting indeed.

The keynote speech went long so everyone was late to my next session on Subtyping by Rocky Burt. I could not manage to catch up, so later in the day I found Rocky and asked if he would give it again on Friday. He agreed so long as I got 10 people to come. Well, the response ont he list was very strong so I managed to get him to do it again. 2pm in the Saffo Room.

I went to a KSS presentation by Balazs Ree. Very interesting, but the work was entirely through the web. Not good. Later I found Godefried Chapelle, lead of the KSS project and offered to do a tutorial on KSS if they would be willing to answer my questions. He was very exciting so it will be one of my tasks during the Plone sprint portion of the conference.

I went to the last few minutes of Philip von Weiterhausen's talk on the direction of Plone in the world of Zope, Paste, Ruby on Rails, Pylons and other frameworks. All the major Plonistas were there. I think he differs in some respects from the current direction of Plone, but I think I agree with him. And I think that his argument is logical and compelling. More on that later.

Alec Mitchell presented on his Plone.app.relations package. This is a much better tool than the Relations product we used for MSRD, but it wasn't mature when we commenced our work. I think we'll adopt it in the long run, since it is lean, mean, and much more logical in implementation.

Then I went to Migrating apps to Plone 3, building off of Generic Setup. Again with the XML! Why use XML as config files? I hate this sort of XML sit up. Grrr...

I hung around for the Lightning Talks, where each person had 7 minutes to describe a project or technology. The best presentation was the German who had cheesy hand drawn pictures who really got his ideas across. The worst was the guy whose material was not in slide format, but in a text editor with an unreadable font.

There was socializing then at some nearby bars before dinner started. Dinner was in the City, and was quite good for the most part. The appetizer was pickled and smoked fish. The prima was a yummy pasta dish cooked in a cream sauce thickened by potato. The seconda was bleah, being shrimp cooked too long. Lastly was an elegant dessert.

Getting home was tons of fun. We packed ourselves into a cab and the driver drove even crazier than the normal Neopolitican cabbie. Next time I want a rocket sled harness!