Lampadas update

[David Merrill <david lupercalia net>]

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Hello folks, I'm here with another update on the Lampadas development 
effort. There have been some major changes in our project.

A few weeks ago I came to the realization that we were just not going to 
be able to produce the kind of system I wanted to, at least not the way 
things were going. As the functionality began to firm up and the system 
became more polished on the surface, underlying problems began to become 
apparent. It was a case of an extremely ambitious project without enough 
resources to realize the vision in any realistic timeframe.

We took a step back, reevaluated where we were, where we wanted to be, and 
how we could get from here to there. After months of coding, I have a 
much better understanding of the technical challenges than I had in the 
project's early stages, so I revisited our design decisions to see if 
they still held.

The primary issue was the fact that I've spent far too much time 
implementing infrastructure such as object persistence instead of doing 
the core functionality. Now that I'm working full time again, I no longer 
have as much time to devote to it. And, being a decidedly nontrivial 
problem area, I was having trouble advancing. Development was going 
nowhere fast. We decided to try to find a platform which would provide 
these basics, so we would be freed of them.

I looked at some application frameworks and platforms, primarily Twisted 
(http://www.twisted.org) and Zope (http://www.zope.org) with CMF 
(http://cmf.zope.org) and Plone (http://plone.org). Twisted was 
technically clever, powerful and just damned cool in many ways. 
Unfortunately, though, it provided few of the high-level tools we were 
looking for. It was not the answer.

When I looked at Zope+CMF+Plone, though, I felt a strong sense of Deja Vu. 
Plone was what my own code was trying to be, solving exactly the same 
problems, but better than I could have. After some discussion, we all 
agreed that taking the time to port over to Plone, while it would be 
quite a hit in the short term, would remove many obstacles from our path 
and move us closer to our goals. We decided to stop feature and platform 
development, and port our business objects over to the Plone platform.

It was a painful decision to discard months of hard work, and the decision 
was not made lightly. It was disheartening, to say the least. But it had 
become the obviously right thing to do for the project, so after taking a 
few days off to rest and renew my energy, I began the port.

I've spent a few weeks now working on a Plone-based product. It's been a 
bit rocky, as one would expect when learning a complex new platform. I'm 
getting up the learning curve pretty rapidly, though, and have already 
made progress. So that's where things stand with Lampadas as of today.

The more I learn, and the more I work with Plone, the clearer the path to 
1.0 becomes. That's exactly the opposite of what was happening before, 
which makes me more and more confident that this was indeed the correct 
decision.

I'll be back to give you another update once there is more news to report. 
As always, thank you for your continued support and assistance.

Regards,

- -- 
David C. Merrill                         http://www.lupercalia.net
Linux Documentation Project                   david lupercalia net
Lead Developer                                 http://www.tldp.org

My father was a relentlessly self improving bloungerie owner from Belgium
with low grade narcolepsy and a penchant for buggery. My mother was a 15
year old French prostitute named Chloe with webbed feet.
		-- Dr. Evil, Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me
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