ContentsIntroductionAlternative Solutions

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The decision to use WELD followed due consideration.  There are a number of proprietary solutions, but they are regarded as risky due to the fiscal motivations of most commercial vendors.  Getting support for a newly purchased product is much different than getting support for a product that is several upgrade cycles behind.  This fact is an incentive for most IT managers to purchase maintenance agreements and suffer through upgrades, even though the tangible benefits are often negligible.

Open Source solutions have a different motivation - get something working perfectly and leave it alone.  Since the source code is available, the system administrator is free to recompile it to match upgrades to the operating system or migration to other POSIX-compliant platforms.  Often, someone else in the Open Source community has exactly the same requirements and has made a pre-compiled version available.  If not, there are thousands of helpers available in the Internet via mailing lists or newsgroups.

The worse possible scenario would be to allow a technology to become entrenched, and then to find out that the company who supplied that technology was no longer motivated (or available) to support an outdated version.  By definition, that cannot happen with Open Source.  Consequently, Open Source should be the primary criterion for the selection of certain types of technology.

A chief secondary criterion should be the functional and performance merits of the technology.  The third should be cost, in terms of personnel-time, licensing fees, and risk of obsolescence.  Popularity should not be a criterion, but for someone who has to hire staff to use the technology: availability of trained personnel does become an important issue (ask a manager who has Ada programs to support).

With these criteria in mind, several alternatives were considered.  These are explained in the following sections.

ContentsIntroductionAlternative Solutions

Previous: Why WELD | Next: Enhydra XMLC

Modified: Wed Apr 19 06:29:20 EDT 2000