[Web4lib] RE: Open source support models

[Tim Spalding]

Incidentally, lest you think I'm being a language snob or bending the
evidence to my own ends, I was a Perl hacker once and I program in
PHP. I do not know Ruby—or Python for that matter. But I've tried to
hire smart, young programmers—for Perl when I was at Houghton Mifflin
and for PHP at LibraryThing. The top talent out there now has mostly
gravitated to Ruby and Python. I *hate* that, but it is a fact.

These is not some sort of bull feeling of mine, but are exhaustively
documented every year by Tim O'Reilly in his yearly book-industry
analyses. PHP, Java and C/C++ have shrunk five years running. Ruby
came out of nowhere and is now quite significant--particularly as Ruby
programmers seem to be less book-oriented than some others.

http://radar.oreilly.com/2008/03/state-of-the-computer-book-mar-23.html

Tim

On Sat, Jul 12, 2008 at 10:26 PM, Tim Spalding <tim at librarything.com> wrote:
> Thanks for the correction on Evergreen.
>
> I wouldn't say I needed correcting on VuFind, though. Saying that
> VuFind isn't mostly PHP because there are chunks of shell scripting
> and HTML is like saying that a car isn't made out of steel and glass
> because it also has leather seats and pockets of air. Much the same is
> true of SQL and, depending on what you're doing with it, JavaScript.
> And if you're going to count lines HTML against lines of code, you
> should also factor in all the GIF and JPEG images, not to mention
> Cascading Style Sheets. This way lies madness.
>
> Tim
>
>> Ha! Fact-checking is readily available for a few of these projects at
>> http://www.ohloh.net/projects/evergreen/analyses/latest (for
>> Evergreen) and http://www.ohloh.net/projects/10977/analyses/latest
>> (for VUFind).
>>
>> So a correction: the business logic of Evergreen is written primarily
>> in Perl and SQL, with a few optimized sections rewritten in C. The
>> current catalogue interface is primarily JavaScript with XHTML, and
>> the staff client user interface is written in Mozilla XUL (XML +
>> JavaScript). The user interface for most new staff client
>> functionality is being built with the Dojo JavaScript framework.
>> Python is used for the internationalization build infrastructure and
>> for the new EDI piece.
>>
>> The choice of language in the project largely comes down to using the
>> most appropriate tool for the job. That's one of the advantages you
>> get from building an application using a service-oriented
>> architecture.
>>
>> --
>> Dan Scott
>> Laurentian University
>>
>
>
>
> --
> Check out my library at http://www.librarything.com/profile/timspalding
>



-- 
Check out my library at http://www.librarything.com/profile/timspalding