Tag Archive for 'development'

Knocking against silo walls

Published by Ben Kepes on September 28, 2008 in Business, Design, Efficiency and IT. 1 Comment

A friend of mine is involved in creating a community website overseas and recounted to me an interesting tail. It seems had a preference to using one of the open source content management systems, and maybe going out to the developer community for any tweaks that were required to make it work to her specification.

The development team she were dealing with decided that in the interests of a "robust and secure" offering, they’d hard code it from scratch in a proprietary development application.

This of course had some unintended (well hopefully unintended consequences) in that it then required a degree in computer science to make even the most basic of changes – thereby tethering her to the development team pretty much for the life of the project.

Now I’m no developer – but I’ve spent a fair amount of time using WordPress, Joomla, Virtuemart and of course the tools we’re using, and helping create, over on CloudAve – and nothing in that experience has proven fragile or insecure. Those systems all have the added advantage of being readily extensible (even by a klutz like me) with a massive community out there building widgets and plugins which, generally, work straight out of the (virtual) box.

Here in New Zealand we have the awesome company SilverStripe doing their own open source CMS, and making revenue from the add on servicing and customisation that invariably goes with a build job.

I was motivated to read this post after seeing a post by Rodrigo – in it he talks about the democratisation of the tools for software creation and congratulates both his own company but the marketplace generally for opening up and making things easier.

Now in the case of my friend, I don’t think it’s a pure and simple case of the development house being "evil" in an effort to guarantee themselves future work. I believe that they’re concerned about doing the job and also about the security of a platform they’ll spend hours creating – however this attitude flies in the face of the realities of the web.

The fact is that things change – and fast. Any platform needs to be ready to be changed, added to, deleted from and generally played around with in a independent, nimble and agile way – nothing that I’ve seen from proprietary systems gives me faith that they enable that.

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SaaS for Developers

Published by Daniel Fowlie on May 7, 2008 in SaaS. 0 Comments

Australian company Atlassian whose web-based products have mostly been behind the firewall have now officially launched Jira Studio at the JavaOne conference going on San Francisco. Jira Studio is a hosted solution product bringing together a number of the Atlassian’s products into one cohesive unit.

At the heart of software development is the code and having somewhere to store it. Outside of Microsoft development the most popular version control systems are CVS and more recently/popularly SVN or Subversion. So at it’s heart Jira Studio is the open source SVN for a hosted version control system. Then Atlassian add to that their products to enhance productivity and collaboration. There is Atlassian’s original two products – the Confluence wiki and Jira issue tracker, and then there are Atlassian’s newer products they’ve acquired – Clover for code coverage, Crucible for code review and Fisheye for repository analysis.

Because Subversion runs on top of Apache web server it has long been available from hosting providers and has been of huge benefit to the open source community allowing developers to be spread all around the world and work from the same code base. Atlassian’s offering adds plenty of value for a premium enabling development teams to have all the tools for productive collaboration no matter where in the world team members are. And even for those teams all located in the same office it offers the classic SaaS benefits over hosting in-house. Pricing starts at US$250 a month for 5 users.

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