Amazon on Mason

Some of you already know or have heard rumors, but:

I am pleased to announce definitively that Amazon.com has chosen Mason as
the templating system for customer-facing websites. The experimentation with
Mason began in mid-2002, and has thus far proved a successful replacement of
the previous in-house proprietary templating system. See
http://www.masonhq.com/about/sites.html for a blurb written by one of the
engineers involved in the switchover.

Right now, Mason completely powers a few of Amazon's product lines and
partner sites like Target.com. Going forward, the plans are to convert the
remainder of Amazon.com as well as the international sites (amazon.de,
amazon.fr, etc.).

Of course Mason forms just one part of a large, sophisticated architecture
comprised of both open-source and custom technology. But it should give us a
fuzzy feeling knowing that the web developers toiling to produce one of the
web's largest commerce sites are at least staring at Perl and Mason
templates. :)

On a personal note, I started working at Amazon this spring (coincidence?!),
but my commitment to Mason remains the same. I'm working on a number of
thorny bugs, doing a masonhq.com revision, and now more than ever looking
for ways to improve performance. Also, I'll do what I can to get some of our
work at Amazon out to the community. In fact, about half of the changes in
1.21 and 1.22 were based on ideas that originated at Amazon.

Ok, now, on to the really big sites!

Jon



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