Chillout Lounge

A Clear win for Open Source

Recently there was a specification for Document Management, and the client was sliding towards java, but was ready to listen on implementing it differently using Microsoft Technologies. So, I had to dig a little into the specifications.

The project was very interesting as it involves
1. WebDAV – Extension to HTTP 1.1

2. Delta V – This is a cool extension protocol to webDAV, that provides versioning capabilities to Web.

3. DASL - Adds cool searching and locating extensions to webDAV, this project was kick started by Xerox PARC in 1998.

4. Lucene indexing - A Indexing File Format to contain sequence of documents with simple definition: A document is a sequence of fields->A Field is a named sequence of terms->A Term is sting.

5. Novell Netdrive – dosen’t require a prelude :-)

6. Goliath – This will be the client on Mac OS


Since the client was specific on the OS as Linux, I thought this might a good opportunity to get the hands dirty on MONO ! as I was reading through the specifications and some initial research, I happened to hit at Jakarta SLIDE and Catacomb and was surprised to see that SLIDE supports Delta V , DASL and WebDAV. And was pretty much the project the client has asked for ?!!! Now I have to consider on choosing Microsoft technologies…. Because it really makes sense to develop the software in Java considering the cost and delivery time for the project. Since Jakarta SLIDE is open source project we could easily customize it, but implementing Delta V and DASL from scratch in Microsoft World would almost increase the development time thrice ?!! Though it might be Fun and kinda Adventure, we cannot do this at the cost of the customer !!! so, finally I had to give up the specifications to the java team in my office !!! hmm… though I have different opinions on open source, at this moment open source clearly wins.

One another instance where I took advantage is, when I had to implement a portal inside the organization as fast as possible. I took out the Portal SDK from Project Hurricane and setup the portal in 20 Minutes time, with some graphic changes. Project Hurricane an open and free community portal built using .NET FRAMEWORK. Project Hurricane Portal SDK is developed by Dominic and Mark [MVPs based out of UK]. Hurricane is also extensible, pluggable, skinnable !

Open source does help improve the world mutually. And I like this mutual benefits.


posted by Logu Krishnan : 7:56 AM