Posts Tagged ‘Open Source’

I am an advocate of open-source software. Indeed, we deploy (almost exclusively of late) many different open-source software solutions for our clients and our own projects. But I often run into issues when talking about open-source software with clients, and it sounds a little something like this:

Client: Isn’t there an open-source product that performs that function?

Me: There are a couple of products that perform the same operation, yes.

Client: Well, why do I have to pay for something that’s already been done and is open-source?

And so it goes. If you’ve ever developed software using open-source solutions (and my guess is you have), you’ve undoubtedly run into the same tortured logic around the myths of open-source software.

Open-source software is free.
Sure, you can download them for free, install them for free, and deploy them for free, but thats about all you can do…for free. Once you need to work them into a cohesive project, they start to cost you time or money. It’s true that good open-source solutions can lower your costs. For example, the restful_authentication plugin from Rick Olson makes it quick and easy to implement an authentication function in a Ruby on Rails, but restful_authentication alone does not make a complete system. It’s always part of a larger application and using the plugin saves the developers time and the client money, but it must be integrated, and that will always cost time or money.

Open-source software is the complete solution.
This is rarely the case. Even when you deploy a Wordpress site, you still need to create the theme and customize the installation (even slightly) and that’s going to cost money. It will definitely save you a ton of development costs to launch a Wordpress site instead of rolling your own CMS (I know some people debate whether or not Wordpress is a true CMS), but it still costs money. This fact is exaggerated even more greatly when you’re building a custom application in Ruby on Rails or CakePHP. There are literally thousands (maybe hundreds, I’ve never counted) of open-source plugins available for both frameworks, but they solve particular problems and hardly ever make up a complete application.

Open-source software is high quality.
This couldn’t be further from the truth. In fact, I would argue that high-quality open-source software is far more rare than people think. Any Tom, Dick, or Lisa can create an open-source project and release into the wild. It doesn’t have to be tested, and it doesn’t even have to work. To declare something open-source, all some has to do is say it is so (like we did, but PopCrit is well tested). No testing is necessary. While I do agree that the community votes with their feet, they can’t vote on everything so there are a lot of unknowns when using an open-source solution in a project. Choosing one solution over another could be the worst decision in the entire project, and cost you and the client even more time or money.

There are probably even more myths, but I think these are the most pervasive and caustic for custom software developers. I am a true believer in open-source, but not for the reason that they save money or effort. I believe in open-source because, every once and while, the projects can change the direction of entire industries (MySQL), and from time to time, they save me time and energy.

-Chris

We have plans to release several plugins to the open source community. PopCrit is the first of these. PopCrit grew out of our need to create rails conditions dynamically at run-time, usually coupled with a form like the one below.

To cope with creating rails conditions, I’m sure you’ve had to do or seen this done before:

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if @f_name.to_s.length != 0
  crit += " AND first_name like ?"
  crit_values += ["#{@f_name}%"]
end

Multiply that by 10 fields in a robust dynamic query form and your code begins to smell. We hate it too, so we created the PopCrit plugin (previously a simple library in our applications) to manage those nasty dynamic queries users love so much.

With the PopCrit plugin, you can simply use the new process_criteria_params method provided. It will take your forms parameters and convert it into Rails loving conditions. Now you just have to do the following:

@cards = Infocard.find(:all, :conditions=>process_criteria_params(params[:dynamic]))

There’s more to it, so feel free to check out our repository at http://github.com/chazlett/popcrit/tree/master.

Or install it, play around, and feel free to contribute.

script/plugin install git://github.com/chazlett/popcrit.git

-Chris