A long-standing project that, close to other technologies, has Plone in the heart as backoffice for content management. The customer is OCG, one of the five operational centers of Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) Addressing OCG-specific humanitarian-logistics knowledge, the Logistics Referential online/offline platform aims to efficiently organize and classify concepts, objects and their relationships, thereby providing simplified, prompt and accurate access and retrieval to any relevant and required logistics knowledge. The knowledge base is built on top of more than 1000 English books, most of them translated in French, Spanish and Arabic. The offline version is updated whenever an internet connection is available and provides the same contents and functionalities of the online version. During the talk I will share a description of the main features, the choices about the technologies involved (NW.js, Plone, Amazon Web Services), success and failures, lessons learned and objectives for the future.

1. Logistics Referential
a Web App for humanitarian missions in fields
without internet connection
Francesco Merlo

2. Who am I
2003: Zope developer at University
of Torino
2007: Plone developer at Reflab
2009: Reflab associate
2019: still there
Fullstack developer
Technical Leader
Why this talk...

3. The challenge
Easily distribute up-to-date
manuals, policies, technical
documentation in critical context
with limited or absent connectivity
Easily and fast retrieve any relevant
and required logistics knowledge

4. Constrains
Standard, but lightweight, website
USB key version
Access via local NAS
100% features and contents for any
access mode

5. The solution proposed
Static website
Portable app on usb
Sync on NAS

6. Numbers
● 50 locations with limited
bandwidth
● 150 usb keys distributed in
trainings every year
● 550 topics
● 1200 knowledge assets
● 2012: kick-off
Remember!
The value of each access

7. At the beginning...
Shared Hosting
Plone
Static website
Google Gears
Chrome Portable

8. Where we are now
AWS based architecture
Plone
Webapp
API / Static contents
HTML5 / NW.js

9. The CMS
● AWS EC2 / Plone
● Archetypes
● pyPDF
● Static dumper
● Knowledge Repository &
Assisted Navigation
● On demand service

10. The CMS
Static dumper
● Walker on site contents
● Dump adapter
● Preview -> Public flow

11. The CMS
Knowledge Repository
● Each book has more translations
● Classification, Cover, Metadata...
● Definition of main topics inside a
“book” using page ranges or PDF
named destinations
Assisted Navigation
● Specific knowledge distributed on
different “books”
● By Family, Context, …
● Who, What, How To, ...

12. The CMS
On demand service
● Pay per use
● Wake Up using a proxy
● Scheduled shutdown

13. The CMS
Pro:
● ZODB
● Component Architecture
● Authorizations / Workflows
Cons:
● Sharepoint is everywhere
● Hard governance with many
files, metadata and relations
● Learning curve for new
developers

14. The App
● JQuery + Mustache
● PDF.js
● Filer.js
● “Powerful” Search
● “Performant” Syncs
● “Smart” navigations

15. The App
“Powerful” Search
● Almost full text
● Faceted search
● AND / OR / NOT operators
● Multiple download
● Smart results ranking

16. The App
“Performant” Syncs
● Static resources
● Filters on contents
● Integrity checks
● Size and timing estimates

17. The App
“Smart” navigation
● Fine grained organization of
knowledge
● Custom PDF reader
● Multiple download
● Bookmark / Url sharing

18. The App
Pro:
● “Hard” separation of the
presentation
● Architecture and code can be
re-used for web, desktop,
mobile
● No Plone competences for
working on it
Cons:
● HTML5 limits
● Chromium / Webkit limits
● jQuery limits

19. Other Tools
● API / NAS integration
● Dashboard
● Data collector

20. Lesson learned
Offline first use cases
Smart solutions
API first development
Monolithic is bad
Testing is very expensive

21. The future
● Plone 5 (near future)
● Electron
● Node.js
● Gatsby.js
● Angular / React
● Serverless architecture (more
or less)

22. Thank you!
Questions?
francesco.merlo@reflab.com
?