Plone Archipelago Sprint - Day 2
On Norwegian cuisine, fire alarms and maybe a little on AJAX.
I am at the Plone Archipelago Sprint where a lot of work is being done for Plone 3.0, which is the next-release-but-one. I am here ostensibly to help with some AJAX framework decisions, however there doesn’t seem to have been much in the way of actual decision-making, although there has been a lot of heated discussion. I’ve tried to contribute what I can, but it’s very difficult with such an established project which already has a lot of informal structure, especially when some people have already written code. I’m going to keep my head down and try and write some useful code and see what pans out.
The venue is an island called Østre Bolærne. It used to be a military training camp, and we’re staying in the old officers quarters, and working in what I guess was a sort of common room complex for the officers. The facilities are good except we have no internet!. We have Internet here though, on the other part of the island, where the refectory is. The lack of Internet has been a real pain, and has slowed things down quite a bit. We’ve also had a couple of fire alarms, caused by people leaving their bathroom door open. The designers of the quarters thoughtfully put a smoke detector right outside the bathrooms, and didn’t fit an extractor, so any steam at all sets off the alarm. Nice to know the Norwegian military is as competent as everyone else’s.
The food is “interesting”, which apparently is a feature of Norwegian cuisine. Last night we had sweet and sour pasta, which is certainly a first for me at least. Breakfast is continental, with some fried food for the anglo saxons, lunch is like breakfast again, except without the fryup. Dinner is an increasingly random concoction. Some of the locals fear we will be served fish balls or perhaps, if we are very unlucky, fish pudding at some point during our stay. Be prepared for a full report if we do get one of these delicacies.
The move to Zope 3 has been fascinating, and personally my interest really is more in Zope 3 than Javascript. Zope 3 introduces a lot of concepts that I have previously only used in Twisted, and a bunch of interesting new ones, such as Views, Services and Utilities. A lot of these things are available in Zope 2 using “Five” an integration layer. All new code should be done in the new style, which is great - it’s a decent deployment target with support for useful abstractions rather than the horrendous hack that was Zope 2. I’m looking forward to really getting to grips with it over the next few days, and learning what I can.