REST API and Python 3

The path to the future of Plone

by Mikel Larreategi @erralin

Plone Conference 2014: Bristol

Why Plone is going to die - by Andreas Jung - @MacYET video
The Beauty and the Beast - Modern JS development with Angular JS and Plone - by Timo Stollenwerk - @timostollenwerk - summary

Why Plone was going to die

Stagnation
No plans for Python 3
Zope was dead
Several leading core-developers left
Several features unfinished and unpolished

Modern JS development with Angular JS and Plone

We are not modernized enough regarding JS in Plone
We keep discussing and changing front-end frameworks
There is a promising world out there with frameworks like AngularJS

Plone Conference 2015: Bucharest

Open Space: plone.restapi: a REST API for Plone

plone.restapi 1.0a1 (July 2016)

Basic content-type information
Basic content-negotiation
Basic content creation

plone.restapi internals

Content-negotiation:
```
Accept: application/json
```

Standard browser request:


          GET /plone HTTP/1.1

Standard browser response:

         
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: text/html

           <html>
           ...
           <body>
           ...

API request for Plone


                  GET /plone HTTP/1.1
                  Accept: application/json

API response:

                 
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: application/json

{
  "@components": {
    "actions": {
    "@id": "http://localhost:55001/plone/@actions"
  },
  ...
}

This is quite elegant, right?

If we have a URL https://mysite.com/my-page the same URL works both for the browser and for the API

Add minimal children information to each page

Example

          
{
    "@components": {
        "breadcrumbs": {
            "@id": "https://plonedemo.kitconcept.com/en/@breadcrumbs"
        },
        "navigation": {
            "@id": "https://plonedemo.kitconcept.com/en/@navigation"
        },
        "workflow": {
            "@id": "https://plonedemo.kitconcept.com/en/@workflow"
        }
    },
    "@id": "https://plonedemo.kitconcept.com/en",
    "@type": "LRF",
    "UID": "fc836cdd270c41edbcae38c05708204c",
    "contributors": [],
    "created": "2018-03-07T10:06:48+00:00",
    "creators": [
        "admin"
    ],
    "description": "",
    "effective": null,
    "exclude_from_nav": true,
    "expires": null,
    "id": "en",
    "is_folderish": true,
    "items": [
        {
            "@id": "https://plonedemo.kitconcept.com/en/media",
            "@type": "LIF",
            "description": "",
            "review_state": "published",
            "title": "Media"
        },
        {
            "@id": "https://plonedemo.kitconcept.com/en/frontpage",
            "@type": "Document",
            "description": "The ultimate Open Source Enterprise CMS",
            "review_state": "published",
            "title": "Welcome to Plone 5"
        },
        {
            "@id": "https://plonedemo.kitconcept.com/en/demo",
            "@type": "Folder",
            "description": "Vestibulum dignissim erat id eros mollis vitae tempus leo ultricies. Cras dapibus suscipit consectetur.\nInteger tincidunt feugiat tristique. Sed et arcu risus. Nam venenatis, tortor ac tincidunt amet.",
            "review_state": "published",
            "title": "Demo"
        }
    ],
    "items_total": 3,
    "language": "en",
    "layout": "folder_listing",
    "modified": "2018-03-07T10:06:48+00:00",
    "parent": {
        "@id": "https://plonedemo.kitconcept.com",
        "@type": "Plone Site",
        "description": "",
        "title": ""
    },
    "review_state": "published",
    "rights": "",
    "subjects": [],
    "title": "English",
    "version": "current"
}

Extend the API to provide CMS features

Provide navigation menus and breadcrumbs
Content-type schemas based on JSON Schema to build forms
Search
Workflow support
Translation of content
i18n-zed screen messages
...

Volto: React based front-end for Plone

https://github.com/plone/volto
Gutenberg project

And what can we do with this for the future of Plone? A react-based front-end for Plone. You may know the Gutenberg project for Wordpress, which provides a new full-JS editor for WordPress. Volto is the idea to have something similar for Plone. This way we decouple all the Plone editing interface from the CMS, and add a way to customize in an easier way. For us in the Plone world is sometimes hard to get front-end developers to do front-end-magic because we have a very complex stack with many ways to do things and many different ways to customize our front-end. With a project like Volto we embrace the front-end world, providing a minimal set of tools in a JS framework to ease the development. I am not an expert at all on JS and React but Volto is something like that.

This approach is being used already in at least 2 sites:

Python 3

Python 2 End Of Life

Zope 4: Zope on Python 3

Michael Howitz (Gocept Gbmh) has lead the effort
An upcoming final release (we are in beta 6 since thursday)
New management interface (using bootstrap)
WSGI support
ZODB conversion tools from python 2 to python 3

Plone 5.2: Plone on Python 3

Philip Bauer (Starzel) proposed it and has lead it
No new features: it should work in Python 3 like in Python 2
Development sprints in Innsbruck, Halle, Munich, Plone Conferences, ...

Saltlabs sprint in Halle (last week)

This is the most important thing that has happened in our world since long time ago

It's something that assures that we will be able to jump to python 3

Yay!!!

Quoting Eric Steele @esteele

For those who say that Plone is old, and has no future

Our grandfather's axe is still sharp as ever
This is our chance to come back and share you what we have learnt
We were just watching.
We are still here.
We have always been here.
We are here right now.