Summary

Bufete Consultor de Mexico (BCM) / Piensa Systems is a private Mexican company established in 1994 as an Information Technology consulting firm. providing products and services with a wide experience on the design, construction, deployment and management of mission critical systems, based on Linux, Open source and Free Software for the enterprise, corporations and businesses in Mexico, the Caribbean and Latin America. BCM - Piensa is the first company to employ Zope technology to develop and implement high performance, large scale commercial web sites in the region.

Case Facts

Piensa.COM Systems needed an inexpensive, reliable, high performance, highly adaptable and easy to learn and maintain tool to develop its own and customer's web sites with a highly dynamic content and interface to many different backend types: such as relational databases, banking systems, legacy accounting and "traditional" systems.

The goal was to be able to develop fast, with high quality coding, easy of use for the end user and without getting into trouble when programming many of the glue code and "support" code. (validations, user interfaces, etc.).

Piensa.COM Systems needed a tool that would allow fast development of web sites with the involvement of several content providers which could be already using simple HTML code from a designer up to fetching data from an online transaction with an e-commerce engine. Its own "Piensa en Linux" web site was developed, first as a testing site and as a production site with a high traffic volume.

Problem

Many of the tools that were evaluated where, before anything else, very expensive; then complexity came up. Most of the projects involved concerns about the chosen customer's platforms for their systems, including web sites. We wanted to be able to develop in Linux and Unix systems and use it anywhere the customer wanted.

The issues were cost, compatibility, the platforms required to run that software, scalability, how easily the tool was to learn by web programmers and reliability. The sites on development often require integrating several different external services or data sources. Professional look and high quality design without loosing maintenance flexibility is a requirement for all projects.

Solution

After a thorough evaluation Zope was chosen because of its quality and very low cost (almost zero), nevertheless there is a company behind it in case support is needed. This provides peace of mind from the professional backup (by the designers) perspective for the product. Being platform independent provided the scalability that were looking for. It also proved to be reliable, and nevertheless the learning curve is relatively easy, the Zope users community proved to be a great help with an extreme fast response whenever a query was made to the newsgroup.

Piensa.COM web site integrates with an open source database (PostgreSQL). It is compromised of several different sections that are conform the whole site. Also, each section could be separated from the main site as easily as moving the file to other location on the Zope tree. Site content information can be added, deleted or updated very quickly without having to know any programming of any kind, not even HTML. Soon will be enhanced with ZEO for better service providing.

The growing range of sample codes and freely obtainable working modules (or Products on Zope parlance) also aids in increasing the development speed of Piensa's professional web sites.