[ajug-members] Too use Open Source or Not

Wed Oct 10 14:46:05 EDT 2007

AJUG should install a blog...
I added a post to my recently created blog for ya... needs material anyway:

https://blog.travisbailey.org/?p=7

behind a self-signed certificate right now, so not production grade.

Travis Bailey
  Travis Bailey Photography
 www.travisbailey.com
 404.664.7782 (c)

        "The greater the artist the greater the doubt. Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize." - Robert Hughes

----- Original Message ----
From: Burr Sutter <burrsutter at gmail.com>
To: ajug-members at ajug.org
Sent: Wednesday, October 10, 2007 11:11:38 AM
Subject: Re: [ajug-members] Too use Open Source or Not

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That is a good one.

We should find the time to craft this into
a blog entry or something….

From: Travis Bailey
[mailto:mail at travisbailey.com] 

Sent: Wednesday, October 10, 2007
8:41 AM

To: ajug-members at ajug.org

Subject: Re: [ajug-members] Too
use Open Source or Not

I agree substantively with all your points.

I think you might miss one Burr... ;-)

F) Prognosticate and Pray:  When making decisions about which technologies
to use on a new project, I think it is important to consider it's
maintainability.  No one small firm is likely to be able to take an
 OSS project into the
mainstream, but that small firm is looking to leverage the community with
support of frameworks and technology.  When a team chooses to use newer
projects like Struts2, Spring2, jBPM, Drools, etc... they are really just
trying, in part, to bet on the horses that they think will be mainstream a year
or two from now.  I think part of the value of developing software for a
company is developing that software with technologies that are appropriate and
hopefully are popular enough the customer can find developers to support and
maintain the software for years to come.  Just because a technology is
best doesn't mean it will become mainstream...

A lot of our decisions about the technology we use surrounds these points:

 Does the technology solve a business problem? 
 Will the technology offer a value proposition
     during it's lifecycle (bleed to maintenance)? 
 Is the technology within a core skillset of the
     largest pool of developers? (minimize the skillsets needed for support) 

We started this project last February with a target initial release of end of
Q1 2008 with a subsequent release schedule likely lasting another year for
"recognized" features.

It is really hard to guess what technologies I will be able to hire smart folk
for in 2009 without paying through the nose.

Travis Bailey

www.travisbailey.com

404.664.7782 (c)

"The greater the artist the
greater the doubt. Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a
consolation prize." - Robert Hughes

----- Original Message
----

From: Burr Sutter <burrsutter at gmail.com>

To: ajug-members at ajug.org

Sent: Tuesday, October 9, 2007 12:25:55 PM

Subject: [ajug-members] Too use Open Source or Not

Travis’s recent response to my inquiry about jBPM has
sparked an idea that I want to discuss with the group (thank you, it created an
interesting thought and I’m NOT picking on Travis, please don’t take it that).

He made a point that jBPM had “headaches” and seemed to have
flaws in a given area (oracle & forking) both of which are I think are
perfectly reasonable assertions as someone who is interested in or trying to
use a technology.    So here is my thought…

Open source projects tend to have a number of quirks as they
are primarily driven by small numbers of contributors, working around the
global, in many cases during nights & weekends.   The successful
 OSS (open source software) projects often have a
charismatic leader, someone to evangelize the core ideas behind the value for
the OSS 
project.   With that said OSS-based projects often lack formal
documentation & QA resources and since most
 OSS projects are founded by coders, not tech
writers/quality engineers you can see the problem.  That is where the
community comes into play and adds significant value.  Struts benefits
from having numerous individuals writing books on that framework, 
consulting & training companies offering services and from having 1000s of
users put it through the wringer in every possible way imaginable.
  Therefore the result is a well documented and well QA’d piece of
technology. Perhaps of the worlds best documented & QA’d
technologies.  The community is also serves as the BA role and in some
cases the project manger role (demanding the core contributors finish on time
by nagging them to death, offering to buy them beer & steak dinners).

Now here is the “catch-22” (or chicken & egg issue), in
order to get all of those extra documentation, QA and BA resources, you have to
be pretty popular and pretty “mainstream” where 30+% of most Java users know of
or are attempting usage of that technology.  Struts, Spring, Hibernate,
Ant, JUnit are just some that fall in that category.  The trick is getting
popular (therefore getting all the goodness of the community) while at the same
time have good enough quality, docs, email list support, etc. 
  Obviously there is the complexity factor as well.  Ant and
JUnit are pretty simple tools therefore it is easier to provide enough quality,
docs & email list support to get a community.

Here are the options I can think of:

A) Wait:  So you might wish to wait to adopt a
technology after it has gained popularity.  Struts, Spring, Hibernate,
Apache WS, Ant, JUnit, JBoss App Server are all “safe bets” and have been proven
by the usage of thousands of individuals and companies.  However, this
puts you very late to the game on OSS 
innovation. People adopting Struts now would be considered to be “laggards”
while people adopting MyFaces, Facelets and/or Seam would be considered “early
adopters”.  

B) Bleed: Or you might wish to bleed a little and adopt the
less mature technology and participate in the community (great community
members can simply be those who develop a test case to illustrate the issue and
attach it to a Jira task).   Bleeding isn’t fun but you might want to
have the most innovative tech.  You might want Struts2 or Spring2 or
Hibernate Shards or an OSS-based ESB to solve your business problem and you are
unwilling to build the framework from scratch or unwilling to pay the huge fees
to a major commercial vendor to provide closed source software.

C) Pay: To pay some open source “consulting” & “support”
company some dollars to help you overcome the lack of docs, best practices, etc
and perhaps even track down and fix bugs on your behalf.
   There are several organizations attempting to make a profit
in this space. Some have already failed as businesses.

D) Build: Build your own solution that solves your
end-user’s specific use cases.  That is quite common for MVC, IoC/DI,
ORM-lite and ESB. I’ve met several who built their own Tomact/App Server like
thing before. Those who built their own clustering/grid-like frameworks. Plus a
lot of custom ESB-like solutions.

E) Sell: If there is only a small community for a technology
but you really, really wish to use it then you work your butt off to evangelize
it. You become a salesman.  A recent example of this was Ruby on Rails and
Dave Thomas.  He was the “maven, connector & salesman” who helped it reach
its tipping point (must read: Blink & Tipping Point).  Bruce Tate also
falls in that category. Now they make great money selling consulting, books,
training, etc.  I’ve personally been accused of the same, as far back as
pushing the notion of the internet, modems, NCSA httpd and CGI for a new
application platform OR even the concept of server-side Java as an application
server. Some of you were around 10 to 13 years ago when I was “selling” those
ideas in Atlanta 
.

I think this is important concept for current & future
software architects, those people who have to make hard decisions about which
tools/frameworks they’ll embed in the solutions they’ll create for their
end-users.  Sometimes we gamble big (try any JAR file we find on sourceforge.net) and
sometimes we don’t gamble at all (we use exactly what IBM tells us to use). 

What do you think about this topic?  

Burr

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