Duration of non supported applications

David Bovill david at openpartnership.net
Fri Mar 16 11:54:26 EDT 2007


Signe - while I'd agree with the purely technical advice given, I'd have to
be frank and say that I would never advise the University to do this. It
would be a waisted effort in my opinion for you or the university to spend
any further resources on software that neither has an internal developer
available or proper external support. They have in my opinion three options:

 1) Redevelop the software using standard web technology for which there are
many developers available.
 2) Buy a commercial package
 3) Adopt a mixed open source strategy

The first 2 will involve a significant up front cost, and most likely result
in limited (perhaps severely limited) functionality compared with a RunRev
approach, but will work out in the longer run. Either of these are the "safe
bet".

The last approach means a painstaking and somewhat risky attempt to share
development resources with other similar institutions and members of this
community (you mentioned Sivakatirswami). Unfortunately the present
community is not set up to develop open source projects where there is not a
strong vested interest (the Metacard IDE). This will I believe and hope will
change for the better in the near future. It has the advantage of costing
only time - but that is a cost. It also has no guarantee of success, but
putting more time into upgrading RunRev based software - without the
likelihood of gaining another dedicated developer is not going to work
either.

If you think you would like to explore the latter (3), my guess is you may
get a few people on this list interested enough to look at how we could host
and develop shared code for use in Educational environments (you can include
me) - if there is a will within the University and it matches a similar need
outside - then you have an open source project. That backed with a little
petty cash to pay developers (not me :) from this list and your in business.
If not I'd advise against using Rev and go for 1) or 2).

Hope that doesn't put a downer on things.

On 16/03/07, Signe.Sanne at roman.uib.no <Signe.Sanne at roman.uib.no> wrote:
>
>
> > I agree with Ken. It would not hurt and would probably help to update
> > your materials to the newest version of rev. At a minimum, you should
> > re-build the "portal" standalone with the latest rev engine. In my
> > view that would help legacy stacks survive longer.
> >
> > Devin
> >
> > Devin Asay
> > Humanities Technology and Research Support Center
> > Brigham Young University
>
> Good morning and thanks to both Ken Ray and you for your advice. When you
> say
> the latest rev engine, do you mean 2.8? I have only 2.7, if I bought 2.8would I
> have to install Vista? What about testing on Window XP then? Can both
> systems be
> present at the same time?
>
> Signe Marie
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