[ajug-members] Too use Open Source or Not

Wed Oct 10 16:59:50 EDT 2007

I wonder how many AJUGers have blogs?

Travis Bailey wrote:

> 
> 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 <http://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
> 
> 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 <http://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 <http://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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-- 
The future is here. It's just not widely distributed yet.
-William Gibson