Osmose pinged me the other day on IRC, pasting a link to his Pontoon branch and asking me to check out the stuff he’s been throwing around. I quickly realized he made substantial improvements to the backend, including things I’ve been resisting for too long, so I wanted to ship them as early as possible.

We worked together during the last week to make that happen and here it is – a preview of Pontoon with the new backend. Please give it a try and let us know if you run into any bugs. As soon as we’re all happy with it, we’ll deploy the changes to production.

The new codebase is way more robust and maintainable, simpler to setup for developers, easier to deploy and what matters most – it works considerably faster for localizers. The following are the most important changes that were made. The complete changelog is available on GitHub.

  • Removed Playdoh for easier maintenance and up-to-date dependencies, including the middleware we didn’t use.
  • Upgraded to Django 1.8, the latest Long-Term Support release, bringing many improvements over the currently-used Django 1.4.
  • Replaced MySQL with PostgreSQL, which is more suitable for our use case.
  • Switched to Docker for easier development setup and deployment to Heroku.

We also moved Pontoon repository under Mozilla organization on GitHub.

And now I’d like to take the opportunity to thank Michael for the heroic effort he has made by throwing stuff around!