From: "BMay"
While I do agree that jumping to a prepackaged Wintel solution can
be a bad idea, I would not be so quick to throw open source in with
that lot.
Brian,
I took the opportunity to play with the php applications that you have linked to YIP sandbox. Each offers a rich set of features. But it struck me that none of them integrates with one another. Each has their own user profiles, administrators, administrative functions, user roles, authentication, authorization, menuing system, and so forth.
Each has their own color scheme and UI design patterns. I didn't look at the source, but I bet that each follows different coding standards, methodologies, and design patterns. So in that sense, I guess I would lump them in with prepackaged Wintel solutions.
It's not that open-source and pre-packaged software are lacking features or quality. It's that you have an integration problem when you go out and find a bunch of off-the-shelf products, and try to patch them together. It's not enough that they all run under under IBM i, php, MySQL, and browsers.
On the other hand, I'm not sure that we in IT do any better. A large organization may have php, MS .Net, Java, and RPG factions, each competing against one another, and not integrating with one another, either.
I think that integrating disparate technologies is IT's toughest challenge, and often its worst nightmare. Perhaps ironically, that's precisely what IBM is promoting with IBM i - consolidating RPG, Java, .Net, php, domino, and other types of workloads under common hardware, middleware, and administrative interfaces.
But it's still hard to manage and integrate disparate technologies.
Nathan.
midrange.com
