'Take 5' with Backendless Founder Mark Piller

We sat down with Backendless founder, Mark Piller, to discuss everything from what he sees as his company’s biggest hurdles to what keeps him up at night. Backendless, is a BaaS (or “Backend as a service”) that promises “More Backend for Less”; more backend features and functionality, support, and care for less effort, time, money and stress.

Mark ‘takes 5’ with Bitnami to give some insight into the passion that makes Backendless tick:

What is the biggest hurdle you have faced or are still facing? 
Building a SaaS service is very different than a downloadable product. It took us some time to figure out how to scale the product and build a reliable system, which can predict outages and gracefully handle them when they happen. Looking back it was the biggest challenge, but it is a minor one in contrast with what lies ahead of us. We have an amazing technology and not a lot of people know about us. Thinking about how to broaden our reach is what keeps me up at night.

What advice would you offer to any soon-to-be startup founders out there? 
Do not rush with your idea. Discuss with as many people as you can, especially ones who had experiencing starting their own company. Try delaying getting any kind of investment as long as you can, but not longer.. Release early and listen to your users.

What is the most rewarding part of running your own business? 
There are many factors, which bring me personal and professional satisfaction. Hearing first hand from the users of our system how much they enjoy using Backendless, how it helped them build better applications, save time and money, get better at what they do. Learning about Backendless-powered apps, which reach the top of the app stores and beat competition that made the mistake of not using our platform. I really enjoy seeing my employees making big decisions of their lives – whether it is getting married, buying their first house or an apartment or bringing a child into this world. Knowing that their employment with the company perhaps made it a bit easier and gave more confidence to make these decisions is a great feeling. I also get a tremendous satisfaction from realizing that we are independent and are free to innovate. We are still relatively small and can move very quickly, it is important not to take it for granted and I highly value that I have the opportunity to work in such an environment.

What problem will your product solve? + How does it matter in the market? 
At the high level Backendless solves the developer productivity problem – it lets you focus on the core application logic and user experience while providing both functional and operational backend support. This results in significant reduction of total development time and apps can be released faster. Additionally, any application built with our service is ready to scale the moment you publish or deploy your app. The infrastructure your Backendless-powered product sits on top of is the foundation of your product’s scalability. At a lower level there is a variety of problems we solve quite efficiently. You can easily create video/audio chats, build location-aware apps with geofencing and location monitoring capabilities, deliver push notifications, include message broadcasts, easily configure security permissions, write your own backend logic using code generators and many more.

How much traction do you have? 
Enough to make us proud of our accomplishments, but not enough to make us comfortable. I do not think we will ever be “comfortable”. That comfort stops innovation and slows companies down. We constantly see new projects starting with our technology and it fuels our inspiration and desire to do more. We’re in the process of preparing a few very significant announcements which, I believe, will be the catalyst for significant shift in the competitive landscape (and our traction stats).

Now for the lightning round! 

Coffee or tea? 
It depends on where I am. Tea in China, Coffee in Colombia.

PC or MAC? 
Mac of course.

Early bird or night owl? 
Give me a coding problem to bring a night owl in me. Most of the midnight oil has been burned though.

Bagels or muffins? 
Neither one. A protein shake please.

Classic or modern? 
It depends on the mood.

Detailed or abstract? 
Detailed.

Washing dishes or doing laundry? 
Yes.

Saver or spender? 
CEO – spender, CFO – saver. I am wearing two hats at the moment.

Hardwood or carpet? 
Hardwood.

Cats or dogs? 
Dogs.

Pancakes or waffles? 
One more protein shake please.

Asking questions or answering questions? 
I am on page 7 of the latter.

Ruby or Go? 
Java.

Javascript or C? 
Still Java.

Learn more about Backendless, or try it for free for 1 hour! Already using it? Write a review and spread the word.

Bitnami Open Source Leaders Interview Series: Larry Garfield from Drupal

Bitnami interviewed one of Drupal’s core contributors, Larry Garfield, for an inside look into the future of Drupal. With over 1 million active users it's easy to understand why Drupal is one of our most popular PHP solutions for content management, and why this application keeps evolving.

If you are just getting started or already a big fan of Drupal, this interview will give you some great insight into how Drupal maintains their community and what the future looks like for this application.

In the interview, Larry explains:

• Who uses Drupal 
• How to get involved 
• What new features we should expect 

After learning more about the project, you can launch Drupal to the cloud or deploy it locally with free installers, virtual machines and cloud templates from Bitnami. Get started in the cloud for free with a $200 credit from Microsoft Azure.

Stuart Langridge:       These are the Bitnami Open Source Leaders Series of Interviews.  I'm Stuart Langridge, and I'm talking to Larry Garfield, who's a long-time Drupal core contributor. He's web services initiative lead for Drupal 8 and he's basically the de facto Drupal ambassador to the PHP world. Hi, Larry. Welcome to the podcast.

Larry Garfield:           Hello.

Stuart Langridge:       So the first obvious question is what's Drupal?

Larry Garfield:           Drupal is an open source content management platform written in PHP. It's an enterprise-grade piece of software, and it's been used by large institutions from the White House to MTV to Amnesty International, the king of Belgium and so on, but it also scales down to small nonprofit, small company/corner store type sites and everything in between. It aims to be the CMS for the entire market spectrum with an emphasis on content strategy and content modeling by thinking of the web as more than just a bunch of pages but as content management that you can then expose on the web. That's really where Drupal's strength lies.

Stuart Langridge:       You've named a bunch of organizations that are using Drupal from the very large to the very small. Are you deliberately targeting everyone from the very large to the very small, or are there particular types of organizations that you think Drupal is best for?

Bitnami Open Source Leaders Interview Series: Dave Page from PostgreSQL

Billing itself as the "world's most advanced open source database", PostgreSQL is bundled with many of our most popular Bitnami apps, including our LAPP stack, Dev Pack, OpenERP/Odoo, Discourse and more. To kick off our new Open Source Leaders podcast series, we interviewed Dave Page, the Director of PostgreSQL Europe, to learn more about the PosgreSQL database and what's to come from the project.

Here are just a few of the topics we covered:

How does the PostgreSQL community work?

Why should one be involved in the community?

What is next for PostgreSQL?  

How does PostgreSQL stack up next to no-SQL leaders?

Does PostgreSQL work on the cloud?

What level of experience do you need run PostgreSQL?

You can launch a PostgreSQL application or stack to the cloud with Bitnami for free, or download any of our free native installers or VMs to run the software locally. Get started in the cloud for free with a $200 credit from Microsoft Azure. You can browse a full list of Bitnami app stacks that contain PostgreSQL on the Bitnami site.

Stuart Langridge:        This is the Bitnami Open Source Leaders series of interviews.  I’m Stuart Lankridge and I’m here talking to Dave Page.  Dave is Director of PostgreSQL Europe, Vice Chair of the PostgreSQL Community of Canada, he’s chief architect of Tools and Installs at EnterpriseDB and he’s a core team member of the PostgreSQL project.  Hey Dave, welcome to the interview.

David Page:                Thank you, Stuart nice to talk to you.

Stuart Langridge:        So what is Postgres? 

David Page:                Postgres is an open source relational database management system. We compete mostly with the likes of Oracle and SQL Server.  It’s a completely open source permissive license.  We have a very large community that are both using Postgres and submitting patches on a regular basis.  So we’re pretty diverse in the things that Postgres supports because we have this large community of people from all sorts of different areas and different industries helping us build the product and add support for all sorts of useful features.

Stuart Langridge:        You talked there about the size and diversity of the community.  Is Postgres targeting a particular use case or does it do everything from small data storage up to huge data stores?

PrestaShop: An interview with Ben Utterback about their groundbreaking ecommerce platform

In some ways, PrestaShop may be the most fun Bitnami stack you can try. Really. That's because, unlike most applications, PrestaShop has a really colorful first-user experience that demonstrates the power of the application. You don't have to even be interested in ecommerce software to appreciate what PrestaShop is doing.

And if you are looking for an ecommerce solution, try PrestaShop. PrestaShop has been downloaded millions of times by users around the world, features thousands of add-ons and modules to extend the platform, and has matured into one of the most full featured, do-it-yourself ecommerce software out there.

We sat down with Ben to learn things like:

• What cool stores have been built with PrestaShop?
• How do you balance the needs of thousands of users and hundreds of community devs?
• How do they do user testing?
• What's coming up next for the ecommerce platform?
• PrestaBox? We'd never heard of it, but we think you should.
• What's up with that amazing first user experience anyway?

Listen now:

Full transcript

Erica: Hi this is Erica Brescia with Bitnami and I’m here with Ben Utterback talking about PrestaShop.  I guess to kick things off did I actually pronounce our last name correctly?

Ben:  Yes you did, Utterback is correct.

Erica: Oh awesome, okay just making sure, I should have asked that ahead of time.  So first it would be great if you could tell Bitnami listeners a little bit about PrestaShop and maybe what makes it unique because there are a number of ecommerce solutions out there and we’d love to hear what’s special about PrestaShop.

Ben:  Yeah definitely.  Well to give you and the listeners a better idea of why PrestaShop was developed it’s important to talk about the history of who we are and what our goals are.  PrestaShop is a free and open source ecommerce shopping cart solution.  It’s simply a software that allows people and companies to sell goods and services online; you download the software, place it online, add your pictures, prices, payment, shipping and you’re on your way.

About the history:  PrestaShop was first created by our current CEO and Co-founder Bruno Leveque.  As a child he started coding computer games from his father’s garage at age eight and –

Erica: Wow.

Ben:  Yeah.  In the early 2000s he started dedicating some of his free time to helping several small business owners who had brick and mortar stores dive in to the world of ecommerce.  During that time he realized the expensive and complicated ecommerce software on the market -- these small retailers would never be able to compete with the corporate giants who had all the capital and resources to build custom websites from scratch.  I guess that’s kind of an answer that it was for the merchant and for – the merchant is and always will be at the heart of PrestaShop.

Our goal is to give every person in the world the opportunity to create a professional online store by providing them with completely free, powerful, and easy to use ecommerce software.  Our first release was in 2007; within weeks we received 1000 downloads.  It was already translated in three languages and after the first year we had 15,000 downloads.  Now 6 years later we’re at 4 million downloads and over 185,000 online stores for merchants actively using it.

Erica: That is absolutely fantastic.  Given that it is open source do you have other than language contributions other people who are actively involved in the development of PrestaShop?

Ben:  Yeah well the community is really the key to our success.  We were developed because of the merchant, because of the community, and we have a saying here that’s kind of “We grow as you grow.”

If our merchant is successful then we are successful.  We thrive by having multiple methods that our community can engage with us; even from the experience developer to the people who don’t know what a server is there is an outlet always for any user to communicate with us with and interact.  We have meet ups, one to two meet ups a month; we get to interact with merchants/developers.  We’ve been to L.A., San Francisco, Chicago.  Internationally in Munich, Poland, London, Ukraine and so on.  So it’s really amazing to meet all these people and merchants from all over the world who love PrestaShop and actually want to help us.

The translation is one part, as you have mentioned, and also the GitHub because we’re open source we have a GitHub repository, and with 20 – I think over 25,000 commits already from 200 contributors in only 18 months we’ve been active on GitHub so we stay true to our commitment of being open source.  They’re increasingly active each day as more community developers collaborate together and the community it’s – it never ceases to amaze us with their talent and their creativity innovation.  On some days you’ll even see us in the top 25 most active projects on GitHub so that is a way that the developers can get in touch with us and interact with our development team and help improve PrestaShop day by day.

Erica: That is absolutely fantastic.  You know going back to your comment about all the user all over the world when you have these meet ups it must be so rewarding for you and your team to see people that are building businesses and who are leveraging your tool to actually kind of bring in their livelihood to generate revenue from your product.  That has to be so rewarding.

Ben: It is, it really is.  Just knowing that you don’t have to pay them a monthly fee for – it’s a free and open source software; so many people have actually set up their own home service at home and don’t even use a web hosting service and they actually build their own website using our free website and it’s just their ideas.  Our merchants ideas and their drive to really make these sales and make their business become a reality to supplement their income or help, like you said, their livelihood.  So it is very rewarding knowing that we are contributing to people’s hopefully happiness and their way of life and growing as a company and helping merchants grow as well.

Erica: Awesome.  Are there any particular stories or any examples of businesses that you’d feel comfortable sharing with our audience?  People love to hear about real world use cases.

Ben:  Well yeah actually, man, there’s a lot.  There’s one – there’s a store, well I forgot the URL, but basically the idea was bringing diapers and formula to the door of mothers who recently had babies.  This was actually I think three years ago and the person, he had the idea and he used – because he recently had a baby so he had this idea was hey maybe I should make a business delivering these goods that babies need and mother’s need and he built the business and it’s doing very well.  We have a blog post about him, we did a success story, so that’s one of them.

Erica: Very cool.  As a relatively new mother myself I can understand the importance of that.

Ben:  Yeah definitely.  There’s also one in New York called Ode à la Rose and they actually won New York City’s best flower delivery.  Their website is beautiful and it’s really amazing to see the customization you can do with a free and open source solution.  Their flower customization is just on par with everybody else’s; these million dollar websites and were you can customize the vases and then the number of flowers and every time you’d click the picture changes and customize how you want and so you could just imagine how many pictures are going through and how the server is taking all these pictures and showing them to the user – to the customer in real time and how fast it is.

It is really rewarding to see that people can make websites that directly compete with otherwise monopolized industries like flower delivery and really make a difference like in New York City when they did win the best flower delivery there.

Erica: Yeah quite a competitive market too, that’s fantastic. Did they have to do a lot of special customizations to PrestaShop for that or were they using your core technology and then maybe just some plug ins and things like that that are already out there?

Ben:  For the ones – customization is necessary.  People can use modules and pre-packaged kind of add-ons to kind of get by, but the customization is sometimes necessary if you want to have it – if you want your vision to be on your website.  It’s really hard to have a vision and only use plug-ins made from different developers and one plug-in here and one plug-in there so customization is sometimes needed.  Most of the websites that are making money and are successful don’t have any necessarily customization in the code other than the template.

Erica: Makes sense there.  You can’t really have a totally truly one size fits all ecommerce solution because there’re just so many different ways that people sell things and different types of items are sold differently so that makes sense.

Ben:  Yeah we don’t market ourselves like that either.  We don’t try and say that “hey we’re gonna make you a million over night” or it’s gonna be in two clicks and your store’s gonna be up.  It is a business and just like any business you’re going to have to take a lot of time to really understand what you want, what your customers want, business plans, and the website is no different.

Erica: Makes sense.  On that kind of extensibility or customizability front how can people customize PrestaShop?  Do you have a special type of plug in architecture?

Ben:  Well the architecture is purely a model view controls.  It’s a MVC structure; it’s made with PHP and smart etemplating languages.  So it’s customized in that way through PHP, that’s the main language, so yeah that would be the way to customize it.

Erica: Great and PHP’s so widely used it makes it accessible to a lot of different types of users so that’s fantastic.

Ben:  Definitely.

Erica: One thing that we at Bitnami really love about PrestaShop is you have an awesome initial user experience.  When people first launch the application it looks like a real store.  Can you talk about how you arrived at offering that type of experience when a lot of applications you fire them up and kind of don’t know where to start?

Ben:  Yeah well thank you for saying that.  We are unique because of the mission and goal to the merchant.  It really all comes together.  The out of the box experience was not something that we achieved overnight it’s something that really took years to conceive and develop and of course there’s always room to improve but we did hundreds if not maybe thousands user tests, merchant user tests.

We saw how they acted when they first started using the software, we talked to merchants who’ve used it for a day, a month, six months, three years from the first versions.  We saw their mistakes, we asked them about their logic and why they performed a certain action at a certain point.  We really strived to understand the merchant.  We didn’t rush to create anything that didn’t’ solve any issues or create something that didn’t enhance their experience.

The reason why we made it look like a real store is because we wanted to inspire the merchants who first downloaded the software and just take a look at the default template and see how beautiful an online store can be by just using the default template.  It helps the merchants understand what kind of pictures go where, give them examples of promotions and banner ads and the difference of a high quality picture over low resolution.  Even beyond the front office in the back office as well, the administration dashboard shows sample data of what sales could be like or what the graphs and statistics actually mean and what they should mean for them in the future.

We’re both inspiring the merchant to build something great and helping the merchant understand the power of these tools and PrestaShop by using the sample data.  It can all be removed in one click and so you can have a blank canvas but we didn’t want to give you a blank canvas to start with because it’s boring and we want to inspire the merchants, show them the ropes, and excite them, motivate them to create something great.  I think we did that with 1.6.

Erica: I definitely agree with you.  I’m curious about the user testing that you mentioned.  Did you actually bring merchants in to your office or did you do that remotely with special tools?

Ben:  We actually did – we had merchants in the office in Miami and the office in Paris.  We actually, our CEO Bruno and along with the rest of the development team, they actually traveled to other – I think we traveled to Ukraine and then we also, I think London as well – where we actually me with other merchants.  Whether it be a meet-up or some kind of event and we saw it there as well.  Of course we also do the remote testing with different merchants.  It’s really an in person and remote.

Erica: That’s so cool.  I think a lot of people talk about doing that type of user testing but it doesn’t happen maybe as much as it should so it’s clearly worked for you since you have such a fantastic interface.  That’s awesome.

Going back to the company a little bit; obviously you have bills and salaries to pay and you don’t offer your own hosting, at least not as far as I know of, so how does PrestaShop make money around an open source solution?

Ben:  We don’t provide the hosting package with the open source solution.  We partner with some of the best hosting providers that’s optimized their servers for PrestaShop and ecommerce.

We trained their team to understand our merchant, our software, and the questions of the community.  We have industry partnerships with this many users and with the community as big as it is and the number of stores that we have.  It’s really it’s a pleasure to have some really nice partnerships who want to partner with us and give their service out to our community.

We do have a turnkey solution called PrestaBox; it’s currently only available in Europe.  We plan on expanding the service.  Yeah so we – but and we also have the SEO audits for merchants looking to have an edge on the competition.  We provide in person and remote merchant training and developer training, these are extensive trainings these aren’t like six-hour trainings, they’re two days each.  We’ve had great feedback from people who took these trainings and we really make an effort to follow up with the participants instead of just training them and kind of letting them out in the wild.  We do a follow ups and we have a great relationship with everybody whose taken these trainings.

Erica: That’s awesome.  And you mentioned PrestaBox which is currently available in Europe.  Is it available throughout Europe and can you comment on when it would be available in the U.S.?

Ben:  Well we’re looking in to expanding it.  There’s really there’s no news yet about expanding it into different countries or expanding it – you know expanding the service.  But we are definitely seriously thinking about expanding the service.

Erica: Okay and can you talk a little bit about what it is?  Is it – it’s turnkey in the sense that you’re actually hosting and managing it, like it’s a managed platform basically?

Ben: Yeah well we do provide the server hosting and the installation and the support.  Right now I think it’s commission based but we’re really looking into kind of changing the way that we offer PrestaBox.  That’s not really our main priority at the moment, PrestaBox is not, it’s really the trainings, the – and also of course our add on store.  Our own marketplace.  We develop our own modules, different payment modules and different marketing modules so the add-ons is also important to us as well.

Erica: Okay excellent.  Well we have a lot of Bitnami users in Europe so that’s why I was asking about PrestaBox in case that’s of interest to them but it sounds like there’re a lot of other great options for folks in the U. S. as well in terms of expanding PrestaShop.

So I’m curious, you know, what attracted you personally to joining PrestaShop?

Ben:  When I joined PrestaShop I was actually doing some phone technical support and just talking to so many different people from so many different areas of the world it was really – it was kind of intense to see the kind of love that they had for the software and I quickly realized it’s because we offer it for free and it’s very, very powerful, and it’s simple to use, we have a great community.

It really just it really motivated me to kind of want to help these guys out and these men and women who want to create their stores and supplement their lifestyle and even hobbies.  There’s so many people who are just doing it for hobbies and they really enjoy it as well.  So just helping the people out and helping our merchants out, that’s really what drives everybody in this company and not just me.

Erica: Okay great.  We did talk a little bit about the community previously but I’m curious; you do have a thriving and growing, it sounds like, community.  How do you balance their contributions or ideas with your own internal roadmap around how PrestaShop should be developed?

Ben: Oh yeah well I mean as Community Manager I can talk about the community all day, you don’t have to be sorry about that.  Well this can be tricky because we have to be careful to focus on internal priorities while still being reactive with the community led improvements.  We have a few very cool tools that we’re using.  We have the forum, obviously, which is a place where everyone can get together to discuss problems and we have a great group of moderators who really make this forum tick.
I can’t stress how important they are; they’re just totally volunteering and it’s really great to have them kind of interact with us in saying “Hey many people are asking about a certain partial shipping feature that they want.”  So it’s really good to have the moderation team with us talking to us.  They’ve actually become actually quite good friends of mine, a few of them.  We also have a feedback.prestashop.com and it’s a crowd sourcing way to get feedback.  Users can submit their improvements and feature requests and have it voted on by the community.

We’re actually currently doing it for our previous version of 1.5.  We’re giving the community a month to submit and vote the most important aspects they want improved in the 1.5.  We’re gonna take the top 20 voted improvements and issues and fix them, improve them, and release the last version of 1.5.  So we didn’t create 1.6 and kind of forget about the user of 1.5; we’re really showing them that we care.

Another one is called The User Club and this is a way where users can sign up and our product team sends them short and quick surveys about their preferences on the product.  We recently had one about the order detail page about:  Which parts of the order page is more important?  What maybe should be more featured or what kind of improvements can we make?  This type of stuff we’d never have known without this kind of feedback.  With the community so in touch with us and their reactiveness and drive to improve the software that they love it really makes our job easier.

Erica: That is a fantastic idea.  I haven’t really heard of people doing that before, I love that, very cool.  Okay changing gears a little bit on thing that people always worry about in particular with ecommerce in security.  What is PrestaShops’ approach to ensuring that transactions are secure and helping your users to make sure that their online store is set up in a secure way?

Ben: That’s very true.  Security is so important and unfortunately it’s never perfect.  You can never be too sure, I think the Heartbleed can attest to that.  Before we release a new version we work with multiple services; they provide various security checks with the software.

We also obviously do community testing and we – a select group of experts, some of them are moderators on the forum, and these are these guys who we trust to test various modules, payment gateways, on different unique server configurations because when you’re talking about security and an open source solution like PrestaShop it’s very much in tune with their own server configuration.  When you’re working on these hundreds of thousands, different server, unique configurations it can be quite tricky so...

Within the software we have automated scanning that goes through a variety of key data points like IP address, location, the number of orders that the customer’s placing, so this is to alert the merchant of any potential threat or fraud transaction.  Like if somebody buys five things at the same time shipping to the same address with five different IP addresses it’s probably gonna be flagged because it’s most likely fraud.

Even for merchants engaging in high risk transactions, ecigarettes and such, adult products, we have partnered up with a great payment processor called Alliance Processing who specializes in these high risk transactions and guarantees these transactions at a low cost.

Erica: Oh that’s fantastic and that’s called Alliance Processing you said.

Ben:  Alliance Processing, yes.  So – and just the fact that we are open source and so active on GitHub is really perfect for security because there can be rapid fixes, transparency in the code, and a constant effort by both us as PrestaShop team and the community in making PrestaShop as secure an ecommerce solution there is.  At the end of it all as we both know fraud can never be 100 percent prevented and every merchant needs to be careful with each order and choose what’s best for them and their business.

Erica: Yes absolutely and it’s particularly challenging when you have a global customer base that’s buying from you.  It’s hard to understand what could be fraud in one country is a totally normal transaction in another company – country excuse me.  At least that’s been what we’ve seen.

Ben:  Yes I totally agree with that.  It’s very difficult preventing 100 percent fraud with – when you’re shipping it internationally and globally like we are.

Erica: Yep and always evolving as well.  So you mentioned Heartbleed which I think is still on everyone’s mind and I don’t mean to beat a dead horse but this was obviously a really crucial thing for all of our users.  What was your approach and how was the Heartbleed issue handled over at PrestaShop?

Ben:  Well once we heard about it I – we all alerted the team, everybody was alerted.  We had a forum post an announcement that went out to every merchant that we have letting them know more about it and letting them know to change the passwords.  The thing about Heartbleed was that it really affected everything as we know it.

It didn’t just affect one just PrestaShop store or anything so just having the ability to reach out to all these people who are using the software and let them know that hey we are PrestaShop but we’re letting you know not only for PrestaShop but for really your life, your security of all your online actions, so that’s how we handled it.  We were pretty reactive.  I think within one hour we sent that e-mail out to everybody and had a announcement on the forum, and a alert there too.

Erica: That’s great yeah I think there were a lot of sleepless nights for everyone for a few days after that came out.

Ben:  Yeah actually I remember getting the e-mail from you guys up at Bitnami actually so you guys were very reactive on that as well.

Erica: We did our best but we had a lot of people who lost a lot of sleep over that.  I mean we have a million deployments a month, we have images on every major cloud platform, and sometimes in some cases tens of thousands of images have been published so there were a lot of things that needed to be updated and a lot of people that needed to be notified.

So that was – it was – I wish nobody had had to go through that but it was certainly a great experience for us to kind of test our internal processes and figure out how we can be even faster next time.  These things happen and all you can do is do your best to be prepared and have the right processes in place to react very quickly to get things fixed.  Because as you mentioned there were always – nothing’s ever gonna be 100 percent secure and they’re always gonna be issues that arise it’s just the nature of software right?

Ben:  Yeah it is.

Erica: So one other hot topic that we haven’t touched on is the cloud.  Do you see a lot of PrestaShop users that are deploying to the cloud or are they mostly using more traditional hosting approaches through some of your partner providers?

Ben:  Well I think that most of our merchants are using the traditional.  I would say a pretty big majority of the merchants are using the traditional hosting providers.  Especially I mean we have so many stores in different countries globally I think that cloud is kind of, is more, is getting bigger globally but I think it really got big in the United States so the cloud is something that’s very interesting to us.  Bitnami having the cloud hosting and the fact that you can first install PrestaShop locally, which is great by the way, to have people just do a few clicks and have this store local installed.  Because I think how difficult it is to sometimes make a WAMP local installation or – it can be very difficult especially if you have Skype running.  So –

Erica: Yeah exactly.

Ben:  So it’s great to have the Bitnami and so you can have the local installation and easily deploy it to the cloud that you guys provide.  It’s definitely something we’re looking in to and it’s very interesting to us.

Erica: Well thanks for the kind words there and we totally agree with you.  A lot of the times people want to deploy something locally, particularly as they experiment with the software or to evaluate a new version or to compare various solutions they like to just have it running locally, it’s easier, it’s faster.  Then sometimes they’ll deploy on top of a traditional host or in a virtual environment, although probably less so with ecommerce, or on a cloud platform.  So you kind of have to support all of them at this point.

Just wrapping up:  What do users have to look forward to in the next version of PrestaShop?

Ben:  Well we want to expand on being even more international.  I think that we are probably the most international ecommerce solution translated in 63 languages, used in over 160 countries.  So we want to make sure that we keep thinking global but acting local.  We’re hiring nine country managers and, in certain key countries, and these people will be employed by PrestaShop but be living in their own respective countries.  They would want to increase our brand awareness, multiply our user base, identify a strategic local partnerships.

To expand on the international aspect we want to improve this translation tool that we have, which is called crowdin, and something that it’s kind of new to us and it’s a website; its c-r-o-w-d-i-n and it’s kind of a translations crowd sourcing tool that people can translate strings or translate phrases and people of that same language can actually vote to see which one is better, which translation’s better.  Which one makes more sense for a certain action?  So we want to improve this to actually have a translation made directly on the website so you don’t have to go to another website.

We want to create a module so if a merchant sees that a phrase is translated wrong make a few clicks right on your website and update the translation, send it to the community to vote on, and have our team to review it.  That’s something that we want to definitely expand on.  But all in all you can expect better speed, optimizations, improvements on analytics, business intelligence tools, because we believe that if the merchant knows the most important KPIs, different forecast trends an specific statistics they make better business decisions and through that lower their overall cost of ownership making them even more successful.  That brings us back to the reason why we were created in the first place; to keeping the success of the merchants at the heart of everything we do.

In the new 1.6 our statistics panel is something that’s really special and something we are really, really proud of because we have real time net profit updates.  So not only do you know your sales but you know actually how much profit you’re getting and these graphs are really beautifully made and front and back office is all bootstrapped and responsive so you could be on the plane connected to Wi-Fi and really be managing your store and thinking of different strategies to increase your sales.  We also have one called the smart forecast and so it can actually predict trends of your business before they actually happen.  It’s really cool to have these kinds of advanced analytics that are unique to ecommerce software.  We want to always improve on that and improve on the business intelligence aspect of running a ecommerce store.

Erica: That is so cool.  It’s really incredible what you can do these days; managing your business from an airplane.  People could never imagine that 20 years ago, it’s amazing.  You mentioned that you’re hiring country managers.  Do you have a careers page URL that you’d like to share before we wrap things up?  I know everyone’s always hiring so we like to put that on there for you.

Ben:  Okay yep so the careers page will just be presstoshop.com and /en, for English, /careers.

Erica: Fantastic.  Well thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today.  I know Bitnami users just love PrestaShop and I’m sure they’ll be grateful as well to learn a little bit more about eh company and the project.  Thank you so much again for your time.

Ben:  Thank you so much, Erica, and the feeling is mutual.  PrestaShop users love Bitnami as well.  I think when we had the bi-weekly contest I think we had more votes than the other 10 people in the contest combined so that was something really special that really showed the love that the PrestaShop community has for Bitnami as well and the great service that you provide.

Erica: Yeah you were incredibly popular in the contest, you’re right, and thanks again.

Try PrestaShop free by installing it on your machine, launching a virtual machine or running PrestaShop in the cloud.

DreamFactory: The Interview

Bitnami co-founder, Erica Brescia, spoke with DreamFactory CEO, Bill Appleton, about DreamFactory, an open source REST API for mobile enterprise application developers. The conversation covered a lot of ground including:

• Mobile app development
• Building rich data applications
• The internet of things
• REST API services layers
• NoSQL versus SQL
• DreamFactory use cases
• Upcoming features in DreamFactory
• And why everyone is moving to REST and JSON

This is part of an ongoing series of interviews we're doing to highlight some of the great applications in the Bitnami library and the people and teams behind them.



Enjoy!



Complete transcript

Erica Brescia: Hi, this is Erica Brescia, one of the founders of Bitnami. And I’m here with Bill Appleton, CEO and founder of DreamFactory. Bill, thanks for joining me today.

Bill Appleton: Thank you.

EB: So just to start out, can you tell us a little bit about DreamFactory for users that aren’t familiar with it, and then we can talk a little bit about your background and why you started DreamFactory.

BA: Sure. DreamFactory is an open source software package for mobile application developers, and we make it really easy to hook up to back-end databases and other services and storage medium and then expose all of that information as a REST API, which is really critical for HTML5 mobile or Native mobile. And you can also use it for a wide variety of other things like the internet of things, basically anywhere you need to connect a database to a REST service.

EB: And what led you to build DreamFactory?

BA: Well I started building service-based applications almost 15 years ago, back when Dave Winer first invented XML-RPC in the late ‘90s, the early 2000’s, and recognized it was just a really fabulous way for a client application to get data from a remote data source. And so the first couple things I built were really on the very earliest services from places like XMethods and things like that. And then later it really gained momentum — this idea that a client application could call a service anywhere else in the world and do this across usually just across HTTP posts. So you know basically anywhere you could have an internet HTML application you could instead write a rich client application that called services. And it really picked up steam. You know and then Microsoft and IBM came out with a SOAP standard, and through one of the big service platforms to come out after that one of the first was Salesforce, and then many different service platforms came out. And so that's really how the company got started. In about 2005, talking with Salesforce, they were telling us about the AppExchange, and so we applied this technology to building the rich applications on top of Salesforce's architecture. And that really started - I built the first AppExchange app Dream Team, and that really started a lot of interest in that product, and we started picking up a lot of customers, people who were signing up for it.

And I realized that we were gonna have to take on some funding or it was just gonna be kind of a ridiculous situation of not being able to take care of these customers. And so we got funded by NEA in 2006 and became one of the leading app exchange publishers. But I guess about 2011 it became clear that this technology that we had pioneered building service-based client applications was going to become really important for mobile app dev, and that in many ways the whole concept of HTML websites was not going to work on mobile and the new world of the internet. And so the other thing going on was that we were getting customers who really wanted us to build them service platforms for various different purposes. And I remember the first one we built we thought well we'll get started with – you know we'll just go get the best open source service platform and we'll start with that as a starting point. And we were really shocked to find out that there wasn't one. And we looked and looked and there wasn't any open source service platform that would put a great REST API on a database and allow you to build a rich application.

EB: Mm-hmm.

BA: And so we set about to build one, and that's kind of you know the phase two of our company that really got started back in 2011.

EB: And you've mentioned open source here several times. What made you decide to build your product as an open source product as opposed to something closed source?

BA: That's a great question, and you know today if you look at the service platforms that are available, and I'm thinking of products that are somewhat similar like Parse or Kinvey or StackMob. They've released those products as you know platform as a service that they're going to host those applications for developers. And that's maybe fine for consumer products, but we're really from the enterprise side of things. And we just recognize that it had to be an open source product that people could install on their own infrastructure, because the enterprise has all kinds of reasons why they – you know how they have to provision an app, how they have to roll it out, how they have to maintain it, back it up and support it. And you know not to mention security being just a huge issue where it's just not gonna work for us to try to host you know the world's enterprise mobile applications; you know I just don't think that's gonna be possible. But with an open source product they could install that on their own infrastructure. They could manage it, and it really was a great possibility. So that's the direction we went there.

EB: Okay. And you're based on I used to say a LAMP Stack, but there are so many interchangeable databases and things now; I guess it's not necessarily a LAMP Stack anymore, but certainly DreamFactory has developed in PHP. Can you share any of the thought or the reasoning for using PHP over maybe some of the other available languages?

BA: Yeah, absolutely. We did think about this a lot, and you know for one thing we looked at Java, and that was definitely a possibility, although I have some questions about you know how open Java is anymore.

EB: Sure.

BA: And PHP was just so widely used, and the drivers were very important. So one of the things that we can do is hook up to a whole bunch of different back-end systems. So on the SQL side, we can do Postgres and DB2 and MySQL and you know all the different SQL databases. On the no SQL side, we have Mongo and Couch and DynamoDB. We hook up to a whole bunch of different path services like Salesforce and external services, and PHP just really seemed to be the best environment because of the maturity level of the drivers. And it is the most widely used web language so it was also – you know our suspicion was it could be widely adopted by the enterprise. There were some good alternatives, things like Node.js that we looked at. We just really think it's gonna be a long battle before the mainstream enterprise developers are gonna want to you know run JavaScript on the back end. So that's how we ended up at PHP.

EB: That makes a lot of sense, particularly when you have an open source product and you want people to be able to engage with the product itself and perhaps extend and even customize it. You want it to be in a language that they're comfortable not only running but working with.

BA: Yeah, I really agree. And that's actually – we have some interesting new features coming up that really help people do that, so that's another important consideration for an open source product.

EB: Cool. Any features that you can share with us?

BA: Yes. This quarter, within the next two or three months, we're gonna be releasing three really significant new things. One is we have extended our client SDK from covering JavaScript, which is a very important use case, but now we're also delivering libraries for iOS, Android, and Windows 8. So that's really cool. You can hook up a new database just with a connection string. It can be a Legacy database, an existing database, and when you hook it up you get the REST API for that database automatically created. You get the interactive user interface that lets you play around with the REST calls and see the requests and responses. You get hard documentation generated, and then you get all four SDK's generated so that you can either build HTML5 apps or Native compiled apps. So we're just about done with that, and that's soon to be a very powerful help for developers building clients.

EB: Wow. I know you have other features to talk about and I definitely want to hear about them, but you know as someone who is not a mobile developer just listening to that, it sounds like you must dramatically reduce the amount of time and effort required to build very data-rich mobile apps. Am I understanding that correctly?

BA: That's a big part of our goal. And it's an exciting paradigm shift really, because in the website-building world, people work on the middleware tier, really server engineers, bringing all these data sources together to build a webpage that they send down to the browser, that you know is a fairly dumb device. It just renders the page.

EB: Yep.

BA: In the new mobile paradigm shift, all of those server assets are baked, and they're just exposed through the REST API. And so what happens is that a single engineer or a small team can just build the client user experience and call the services and build incredible applications with a much smaller group of people involved. And so that is totally the development model we're trying to enable. And you hit on it exactly; you just go hook up the asset on the back that you need with the admin console, and then you just go to the client. The SDK already has the glue to use that thing, and you just think about the user experience and the graphic design and how you want to build that client. And it's really a game-changing difference.

EB: Very cool. Yeah, I can just imagine you know from someone in an enterprise IT department or development group who's already so strapped for resources and time but has this audience of employees or customers, as I guess they think of them, who are demanding you know mobile apps and access to their company data and the tools that they need to do their job on mobile devices. This has to be incredibly helpful for them.

BA: It is. And those guys need to be able to leverage the existing databases that they have, their existing data sources, and through Active Directory leverage the same roles and permissions that they're already using for their web apps or their internet and then deliver that exact same data with the same permissions to the client. And then the client application is going to have to change. You know they don't want a website anymore where they click get a page, click get another page, and they're delivering a giant HTML packet down to the client. Now they've got a smart client and they're communicating with very agile JSON packets, which are gonna be 20 times smaller than the corresponding HTML. And it’s really a game-changing different way that they can use their old data with a new app.

EB: Yeah. And all the you know LDAP support and OAuth and things like that have to be incredibly helpful too. I hadn’t really thought about the need and the ability to hook up to all of these existing systems to control who has access to what as well. So that’s very cool. So I know I took us a little bit off course there, 'cause I really find that interesting. But what are some of the other features that you have coming up?

BA: So another really big issue is server-side scripting and server-side events. So if you think about a REST API where you’ve added a couple of databases, a couple storage systems, a couple external systems, and you’ve now controlling authentication, which users can see which pieces of data and everything like that. It’s like a tree of data sources that come through the REST, through the URL command, you know the string of URL parameters that lead you to the REST asset. And so with server-side events, you can receive a message whenever any one of those nodes in the REST tree is being used. So for example, every time somebody gets an account record, you can get a message. And then with server-side scripting, you can change what happens on any of those nodes. So for example, if an account is created where the value of the account’s more than a million dollars or something like that, you can receive an e-mail. Or when a user changes an object, you can create another object that remembers what happened. Or when a particular type of action happens, something’s created, something’s deleted, you can send an event to the client.

So that’s just a really important capability to allow server-side scripting and server-side events, they’re kind of related, to handle all the special cases on the back end in a secure way. And so the way that that feature’s rolling out, we’re supporting both PHP and JavaScript to write those server-side handlers and the client developer can just go to our admin console and make those changes to the back end, it’s very, very simple, with either PHP or JavaScript. And we’re using the V8 engine to handle the JavaScript version of that. So that will be a really big change to the platform. It really doesn’t change the platform, but it’s an exciting new capability.

EB: It sounds like it. And do you have any target release date for that feature?

BA: It’ll be in the next two months. It won’t be this month, but I think a month from now we’ll probably be ready. So we’re putting the final touches on it, but have to do a lot of testing to make sure that it’s secure and that it’s gonna be easy for people to use. We’ve been working on it for a long time, and we really want to do a great job of that and make it really easy for people to change the things they need to change on the server side but to do it in a rational way so it doesn’t kind of take us back down the road of lots of complex server-side software.

EB: That makes sense. And are there any other features that you’d like to share with us right now?

BA: Sure. There’s one other really good one. For both SQL and no-SQL data sources, we let you from the admin console put a filter on them. And so what this lets you do is, for example, you could set up a certain user role to receive a certain object but only if some condition on the object is met. So like this role can only see accounts that are less than $1,000.00. Or on this role they can only update objects that they created. So very simple use cases like that we’ll be able to implement with no code at all, just by typing in a couple things into the admin console and configuring the back end. And that handles a really large number of security and other use cases around user roles.

EB: Yeah, I could see how that could be a huge time saver and deliver a lot of additional value to people in the enterprise who have those kinds of requirements. You mentioned no-SQL versus traditional SQL databases there and earlier in our conversation. I think you’re kind of in an interesting position because you’re a services platform and you have the ability to hook together all kinds of different services and support all kinds of different services. So you must be seeing some interesting trends there. I mean what are you seeing around the move from traditional SQL databases to no-SQL databases?

BA: That’s a great question. I want to make two points. One is on the back end there is enormous variety. If you look at you know DynamoDB, MongoDB, CouchDB, they’re really different. But on the front end of our REST API, we treat all no-SQL databases with a single interface. We do the same for SQL, so on the back end everything from Postgres to MySQL, DB2, whatever, but on the front end they all have the same REST interface through DreamFactory. Same with file storage; wildly different on the back, all the same on the front. And so what happens is this means you can switch out back-end services without recompiling the client application, and it stops lock-in to any particular service. And so it’s just an interesting attribute of a service platform that has this mediation layer. And then it really provides you an interesting look at the difference between no-SQL and SQL. And no-SQL, developers really like it because of the document-oriented nature of the data.

So you might have an account with a related list of contacts or related list of leads or whatever, opportunities say, and that might be a no-SQL document. But the interesting thing is is that our SQL interface supports related objects in the query, and they’re delivered as subparts of the document. And so we really blur the line between the difference of no-SQL and SQL, because you can use your SQL database and we'll dynamically deliver structured documents of the arrays and the sub-elements that you’ve requested. And then you can make changes to those as if it was a no-SQL document and then push it back and we'll figure out all the changes, re-parent any differences that you’ve made, create any new children objects, and it’s just kind of automatic. So it’s interesting to see all of this develop and all of these data sources and how people like to use them.

EB: Yeah, especially when they’re all coming along so quickly. And as you said, they’re all different, right. They all have their advantages and disadvantages, and being able to switch out the database without recompiling the client-side app has to be huge for developers who want to try or feel the need to move from one technology to another. It gives them a lot more flexibility and like you said no lock-in.

BA: Absolutely. So if you need to go from Amazon to Azure. You know need to go from on-premises to the cloud. You need to go from dev to test to production, you can do that on DreamFactory services platform with no changes to the client, just by setting up the back-end configuration differently. So it’s interesting to see how that enables some new things.

EB: Yeah. So you know you’ve touched on a few different examples of how people can use specific features in DreamFactory. Can you talk about some interesting use cases or apps that you’ve seen built with DreamFactory, even if you can’t mention the names?

BA: Sure. Since we launched in November, we’ve been out really about six months, and there’s just been really rapid adoption of the product. And we’ve seen some really great use cases coming to the floor. With HTML5 we have good support for both Angular and Sencha, and so that’s a really vibrant community. And so we’ve had some great you know one-page rich apps written that are on various app stores and do all kinds of different things for you know database access or collaborative use of data. We’ve had a couple people write conventional websites on top of DreamFactory, which actually works just fine and may be the model of the future, quite frankly, as things move to services, something to think about. We’ve had a number of people write Native mobile apps on android and iOS, and some of those are really beautiful and you can you know use all of those services just in the same way. They are from Native mobile; there’s no barrier at all there. And you know really for Native mobile, they can’t use HTML, so they’ve got to do something different. And everyone’s moving to REST and JSON as the way to provide collaboration in that situation.

One thing that surprised us is the number of people doing either the internet of things or wearable devices or even just enabling partners to use their database through the REST API. So in those cases it’s you know directly using REST from either a native or a JavaScript engine in you know building process control is one area that we’ve seen. And another is internet of things vendors who are looking for an easy way to enable the back end. And in the last case it’s really just server-to-server communication using the REST API. So for example, if you’ve got a database and you want to safely enable a partner to do something with it, for example put records in it for lead passing, something like that, a really great solution is to install DSP. It makes a partner portal, and then you can assign a role to that partner and give them a complete REST API and client SDK to do whatever they need to do.

EB: That is very cool. I hadn’t thought about that use case before, and I don’t know if you had when you first started out either. But it makes a lot of sense, particularly like you said as everybody’s trying to move to more of a services model and partners are looking for and demanding access in some cases to that type of data to strengthen their partnerships with companies.

BA: Yeah, absolutely.

EB: Or I should say I guess build on top of their platforms. So you know you’re really the only open source platform like this, at least that I’m aware of, so it might be very new to a lot of people, just the concept in general. And I’d love it if you could talk a little bit about how people can get started with DSP. I mean obviously they can get it from Bitnami, which is great. But once they have DSP up and running, you know what would you tell them to do to get started? What resources are available to them?

BA: That’s a great question. So we do have a free hosted edition on our website, which is there for dev and test. We are not trying to host the world’s mobile applications. We really depend on Bitnami for people to go get the software package, and then they can install it on Azure, on Amazon, on VMware. And then Bitnami also has some great paid hosting options. You’ve even got a one-hour free trial. You can also put it on your desktop, so it’s just really versatile how you can get it. Once you do, you just go to that URL where you installed it and you’ll get our admin console. And that’s an HTML5 application that just uses our own services. And since the first person logged in will be an administrator, they have a lot of additional capabilities that they need to create users, create roles, create services, and to create schema and all of that stuff. But you don’t really need to – you know you could just use the UI for that and set up your back end. And then really the developer’s job is to write the front end, and that’s where the SDK’s come into play. And then that’s really – you know we will host HTML5 files on the platform, and of course for native developers they need to go get you know Xcode or Visual Studio or Eclipse to write their client application.

But it’s easy to understand. It really all comes down to what is the REST API that’s been exposed, and so you know every time you hook up a new database, four things happen. It’s added to the REST API. You have hard documentation generated. You have an interactive console to play with the API from the admin console, and you get that client SDK for whichever platform you’re on, and you just start making the calls. So that’s really how someone would proceed. You could also come to our website, dreamfactory.com, and especially the developer’s menu has all kinds of examples, SDK’s, and downloads, including the Bitnami package downloads, available to, hopefully, one-stop shopping with documentation to make it easy for developers to get engaged.

EB: Okay. And you also have a pretty generous one-month free support offering for people who register on your website, correct?

BA: We do. So yeah, when you install you can start your one month of free support. You can always – even if you don’t, you can always e-mail us with a support question and get started. For customers who need a commercial license and paid support, we have that available as well, and that’s on our website.

EB: Okay. And do you also provide any kind of development services for people who need help with building their app?

BA: We do. We have professional support, you know professional services for people who need help building something. Most of that is gonna be – our role really is to be sure that REST API is there. We do provide some good examples and you know for the client side, and so hopefully that’ll be enough to get most developers into building their first app.

EB: Great. Well this has been really helpful. I think we’ve covered a lot of ground. Is there anything else that you’d like to share with Bitnami users before we wrap things up?

BA: Hmm. No. Just we’re big fans of Bitnami. You guys have really helped us. You know it’s not just distribution and also packaging. You’ve really got a great infrastructure as a service marketplace, and people like it. It really reduces the friction, and that’s what we’re trying to do is make it easy for people to get in and use our products. So thanks, Bitnami. And we’ve got an exciting year planned, and we got a lot of new features coming out that are really being driven by the community. It’s a really exciting product, and I think it’s incredibly forward looking and yet a practical thing to get started with today.

EB: Yeah, absolutely. And thank you for taking the time to talk a little bit about DreamFactory with our users. You know it’s something that I think initially is a little difficult for people to get their heads around. But hopefully this interview and hearing you talk a little bit more about what you can do with DreamFactory will help more people decide to give it a try, because it is really powerful and a really cool product that we’re excited to have on Bitnami. And one note just for Bitnami listeners, we are working really closely with DreamFactory to make sure that we always have the latest and best release available on Bitnami. So as soon as these new features come out, we will make sure that we have the package available on Bitnami. And if you register when you download DreamFactory, we’ll make sure that we let you know when those new releases are available too. So with that, thank you so much, Bill, for your time. I truly appreciate it. And we look forward to all the great stuff that’s to come from DreamFactory this year.

BA: Thanks, Erica.

DreamFactory is available from Bitnami to install as a native installer, a virtual machine, or in the cloud. Learn more and try DreamFactory for free.

Talking Discourse: An Interview with Jeff Atwood

One of our company founders, Erica Brescia, recently spoke with Jeff Atwood to ask what to look forward to in the 1.0 release of Discourse. We use Discourse for the Bitnami community, and we distribute Discourse for one-click, easy installation with native installers, as virtual machines and into the cloud. 


The conversation covers a lot of ground including:

• Why Discourse is a big giant ball of javascript
• The MySQL and PHP ghetto
• The cure for PHP server herpes
• Upcoming features in Discourse 1.0
• Why working on small features can be better than the big ones
• And more

Listen to the interview now or read the full transcript below. Click to play, sit back, enjoy.

Full transcript

Erica Brescia: Hi, this is Erica Brescia.  I'm one of the founders of Bitnami and I'm fortunate to have Jeff Atwood here, one of the creators of Discourse to talk a little bit about the Discourse project and what they have coming in the future as they work up to the 1.0 release.  So Jeff, thanks so much for joining me.

Jeff Atwood: Oh, you're welcome.  It's great to be here.

EB: And to start out, you know, discourse is, while popular still, a fairly new project.  I'd love it if you could tell Bitnami users a little bit about the project and what made you decide to start Discourse.

JA: Sure, so the main thing that motivated Discourse was that I couldn't find any forums that I felt comfortable recommending to people that needed communities.  And community is so important on the web and it just made me a little bit sad really that all the options I could find were ones I would nota feel comfortable installing myself.  They just weren't modern for lack of a better word.  There was a lot of really legacy stuff, legacy technology and there was no like leader.  There was nothing like if you were gonna set up a blog and you talk to somebody about it, somebody will say to you WordPress at some point because it's kind of the obvious choice.  It's open source, it's got a great ecosystem.  

You know it's essentially free and there are so many ways to host it and there are so many plug-ins.  And I want there to be something like that for forums because this idea that you have people talking to each other about a topic is really essential I think to a lot of businesses and a lot of communities too.  So discourse is supposed to be, intended to be the WordPress of forums essentially.  That's what we're shooting for.