At our company, we are looking at replacing a number of legacy systems that handle information from our customers into our company. Typical systems allow the user to drop an ftp file somewhere. This file will then be transformed by a number of programs and eventually end up in some kind of database. In total we have +30 different "systems" or applications that does this. And, it is more or less a mess.
We believe we lack a common system to manage these flows: triggered by upload or possible another event, register the data, create some sort of "job" (or process) from it, pass it through the variuos services/transformation programs it needs to go through, provide feedback to the customer, provide information about progress, etc to us, handle failures and so on. Sort of like Jenkins (/Hudson/CruiseControl/similar) but for information transformation jobs, rather than build jobs, and with a job beeing more of a "process instance" of a job, then the job itself (e.g. different data should trigger the job several times, running concurrently).
We are cabable of writing such software ourselves, but surely software as this exists(?) I have been googling around, and found that what we need ma possibly be "job scheduling" software or "business process management" software. However, these are all new domains for us, and I am quite uncertain to as what kind of software would fit our needs. It appears one could invest quite a deal of ressources into this type of software before
So, what I am looking for is pointers to what kind of software or systems that could solve the kind of needs we have. Preferably Open Source, Java based, running in a Java EE container or similar, but really, at this point, almost any pointer/hint will be welcomed :-)
Thanks in advance
P.S. I realise I may be out of scope for Stackexchange, but I have been unable to locate another forum where this kind of question might be answered, so I hope it is OK.
I know of the following products:
Redwood Cronacle (I worked with it 1994-1997 and it still runs). Purchase product. Oracle and C based. Strong in multiple server platforms. Embeddable.
Oracle E-business suite core. Purchase product. Oracle based. Strong for integration with the same ERP system. Weak for multiple server platforms.
Invantive Vision (I developed it :-). Purchase product. Oracle and Java based. Strong in integration with ETL (Pentaho open source). Weak for multiple server platforms. Embeddable.
Quartz Scheduler. Apache license. Java based. Worked with in 2004 or so. Strong focus on embedding.
Hi I don’t know if you will find that solution in open source or Java. It sounds like bespoke or custom software to me. I would advise you to search for a project management software developer with high level of IT and Data warehousing. Ask for bespoke and customized installations with a real time database. I think you will solve your problem with this.
We are a small Microsoft shop with 4 developers. We like the idea to have everything integrated and under the same SQL database but not to deal with too many features or a complexity we don't need.
The other option would be to use two distinct third party tools. We also wonder if VS2010 version control and bug/issue tracking capabilities are comparable with the best third party tools on the market.
With TFS 2010, there is a TFS Basic version/configuration options. You can use SQL Server Express as the database, the install is simple and quick and you can install it on a client OS. It includes version system, work items and build system (no sharepoint, reporting...). Price should not be high, the target users for TFS Basic are those used to use SourceSafe. Also if you have MSDN, there is a change that it goes with it, so you would not have to pay extra.
Some thoughts on TFVC in general -- note that I've never used TFVC specifically, but I've been in a similar situation a couple times. My main concern is that it's too little.
TFVC (Team Foundation Version Control) appears to be a client-server version control system. I don't know anybody who hasn't upgraded to DVCS yet. I've never used TFVC but I can't imagine what benefits it'd offer to outweigh the architectural disadvantage. (And before you ask: I only use it from my workstation in the office, where the network has never gone down, but I still use its distributed features every day.)
I also work at a small Microsoft shop with 4 developers and we have never once regretted using Mercurial. It's one of the few decisions we made that everybody seems to have loved. It's one of those moves, like switching to a language with GC, that you never want to even think about reversing.
In terms of support, I hope you found some way to get great support from Microsoft. Things will come up with any VCS and it looks like community support is a couple orders of magnitude worse than Hg or Git.
I can't say much about bug trackers -- I think they're all pretty much the same these days. I've installed a couple open-source ones in an afternoon, even with no experience. The major difference seems to be, if you go with a big-name one, you'll be able to find lots of tools and extensions that work with it. For example, there are a million and one extensions for reporting/testing/etc. for Bugzilla. TFS probably has similar things, for enough money.
Two other things I'd keep in mind:
First, even if you only want these 2 features today, you will want other features in the future, and it will be (sooner or later) something Microsoft doesn't offer. So it's best to make peace with 3rd-party tools ASAP.
Second, unless you miraculously happen to pick the perfect set of tools for your company's future growth for all time, you will at some point want to migrate away from whatever solution you pick today. So make sure it either provides a way to do a full export, or is popular enough that other projects are falling over themselves to write importers for it.
I guess this all sounds kind of negative for TFS. I didn't really mean it that way -- I'm sure it does some things really well. But unless you're rolling in dough already, save your money.
Good luck with whatever you choose!
TFS work ittm tracking is awesome. Whatever your workflow is and the information you want to gather, you can do it easily with TFS.
Most expect TFS to do what they do out of the box as if it were omniscient. Unfortunately, you do things slightly differently than me and I from everyone else. The key is making it easy for the many different roles in your organization to get and input information into whatever your work tracking system is.
There is a plateau you will reach with custom, cobbled together tools that you won't get from cross referencing information along the product development process. TFS removes that barrier. The second barrier is knowing how to consume the information and that takes training and experience in effectively managing projects.
TFS Version control is certainly the low point when compared to the industry right now. DVCS popularity exploded about the time TFS came out. That said, Brian Harry has stated that TFS "fully expect that we will be adding distributed version control to TFS." http://blogs.msdn.com/bharry/archive/2010/01/27/codeplex-now-supports-mercurial.aspx
Take that as you will.
TFS is a great system but after having deployed and used it for some time I realize that the TCO is just too high to justify for a small team.
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I'm currently a developer at my first job right out of college. I work for a large company, and the trend I notice with them is that they tend to go with more expensive, closed source software about 99% of the time, while there are perfectly good open source alternatives that are available, most of which are vastly superior to their closed-source counterparts. For example, we use this absolutely awful source control software that cost a ton of money, while there are quite a few open source and/or free options that in my experience, albiet limited, are much better and offer basically the exact same functionality.
I guess my question is: How would an experienced developer approach management about using more free software?
It appears there is another question very similar to this that did not show up when I made this one: How can I convince IT that F/OSS software isn't evil?
EDIT: Just come clarification. I'm not necessarily trying to change the company's procedure, I'm looking for advice on how to approach management about the subject.
Start using it in small utilities and things which are throwaway and don't need management buyin. This can prove the worth of an open source solution and put a crack in
the door for using it in other
projects.
Present articles from trade magazines showing that other people are using the open source solution.
Go with products which have commercial support options, such as MySQL, which enterprises seem to have an easier time swallowing.
Pick your battles carefully. Wait until they are suffering. If they are happy with what they have, they will not switch, no matter how much cheaper or superior the alternative is. You need to catch them while they're trying to think of ways to save money, or while they're disgusted with the problems of the current system.
Be very careful with what you refer to as free. There is a very large corpus of products that would be perfectly valid for a student to use without paying that an enterprise would have to pay for. Also never forget Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). A lot of relatively expensive software is expensive because you get things like configuration and help support for them whereas that may not be the case for free software.
I think you are not asking the right question. To me, the challenge is to have my Big Corp to buy the BEST softwares for me, be it free softwares or not.
Paying for Windows or paying for Linux is not important (what is 100 $ for a Big Corp ?).
But having things done better is really important.
I think that your request to your boss should not be : "Hey, it's free and it's as good as XYZ, why are we using XYZ ?"
Why you boss would risk something trying the product you told when XYZ seems to be ok ?
It would be much more better to ask : "Hey, here is what I cannot do with XYZ : (your list). With my product, I would be able to do that and much more so fast than I would have a lot of spare time to test our own software !".
Small money is usually not a show stopper. Being able to work faster in order to do much more testing (or any other things that could help your boss have a better image) is definitely an excellent argument !
Best wishes,
Sylvain.
I work in a big company that has recently moved into being more enthusiastic about open source solutions. There have been a few big hurdles:
Customer won't support it - we're defense contractors. We do almost nothing without customer say-so. As the customer's opinions have changed we've been able to change our architectures and tool usage. That said, there are still scenarios were open source is unacceptable and we don't use it.
No tech support = scary - in several cases, it's been possible to make the point that open source may not have a single point of company tech support, but it does have huge communities that will support questios for free, and that there are consultants available as needed for the really hard stuff. Plus many, many releases of new versions for bug fixes. And, several competing expensive products have not been able to service tech support needs. Being able to point to specific internal examples with long. well documented, histories of support problems, has been key.
Fear of security issues - we had to develop a process for scrutinizing and controlling every peice of open source introduced. We've managed to find criteria for what we deem risky, versus what we deem relatively benign based on info-sec policy.
Fear of lawsuit - Being large, and profitable, we fear lawsuits, we're great targets. We now have a process for the legal team to scrutinize every open source license. This has proved to be a win - since the legal team now has briefings on every major version of the typical open source licenses, and they can quickly review most stuff.
Version control - fear that if those wacky developers can just download anything they like the world will self destruct. OK, well, practically speaking, the concept of "how do we know what's in a given product" - being able to show a FOSS version control process that is managed internally has been important.
It was definitely a slow process - small projects proved profitable and customers started encouraging it in proposals. That made it useful for executive management. It's helped that those that support it have been williing to put in some extra time to making the business case in terms of efficiency/cost savings, and have been willing to negotiate repeatedly with various parts of the corporate infrastructure.
Making open source work has taken the effort of IT, the info security folks, the legal team, the procurement team, and technical management. Knowing that before you talk to your manager is probably a key to success.
There's also some political savy - for a first project, don't encroach on any sacred cows - ie, those projects that may not be successful, but are high profile and owned by someone with lots of political power. Instead, choose some wacky new thing that isn't available right now and prove the cost savings in a way that is unlikely to provoke a defensive reaction.
When you try to introduce open source software to a big company (or even a small one, in many cases), the biggest counter-argument you're going to hear is "There's no tech support." Companies tend to be wary of using software that's supported by the community, because there's no guarantee (or in some cases, service agreement) that questions about the software will be answered within a reasonable time frame, or at all. In many cases, you can find a company that will provide support for the open-source package you want to use (for example, Red Hat does this for its Linux distribution, even though the contents of the distribution is mainly open source). Showing management a business entity that can support the software will often go a long way.
The other counter-argument to using open source software that I've heard the most often is "Open source software is buggy." This is a tough one; this opinion is pretty ingrained in some corporate cultures. Two possible responses are "The open-source community fixes bugs quickly" and "Since we have the source code, our engineers can fix bugs"--but that's often not what managers want to hear.
So, in essence, it depends on the company, their attitudes, and how much they trust you to make business-critical recommendations. I've used all of the arguments above with different levels of success in different companies.
Of course, in these economic times, the "free" part may go a long way. :-)
"Free software" doesn't necessarily mean your company is going to get software for free. Many successful open-source projects are also offered with licenses and services that cost real money and are geared to organizations that want or need to be assured of good support. MySQL is an example
The reason for a lot of big companies using closed software is that they can call support and the vendor will issue a hotfix, patch or cumulative update
Changing a large company's habits are often like turning an Oil tanker around... it takes a long time and uses a lot of energy.
If the company were in the process of evaluating the purchase of new software for a specific task, Then I would make sure to write a concise opinion memo about why my choice is better.
If the software is something I would use personally and not a server product that multiple developers are forced to use, then I would just ask my manager to use it.
If the software is in place, does the job (even if I don't like the way it does it), i'd learn as much as I can about it to give it as much chance of work for me, or at least make my life easier. If it still sucks really bad, I probably wouldn't try to change it until it was time for the company to pay for an upgrade.
If the software works but is just annoying... I'd do as above, learning all there is to know about it just to make my life easier and then deal with it.
You're probably right that the system you'd recommend is better than the one currently in place. But like some other posters said, choose your battles, especially when this is your first job out in the real world. You may become expendable quickly.
It's not really so much a matter of what's better, even if your way IS better, it's a matter of the culture and the way things are done and the cost of switching. Even if, hypothetically, their system can be magically transported to your OSS system, with no loss of data, dates, records, or anything, you're still going to have people who say "I liked the old way better."
Remember: Experience is what you get when you don't get what you want. I know it may sound glamorous to be "the new guy who recommended a great new versioning system that everybody loved", but you also could just as easily become "that hotshot who insisted on a new versioning system that everybody hated." It's a much smarter career move to just play by the rules at least for a little while until you have some clout and can make some recommendations. In the meantime you may even learn why the old system is preferred, or learn to like it more the more you use it.
I know what you mean. It took us years to convince our managers that everything would be okay if we moved away from using Interbase (a commercial Relational DB) to it's opensource counterpart Firebird. Mostly it was fear of no support that blocked the move. I think the factors which changed their mind were:
tests showing better performance
that there are companies that provide and charge for supporting the OS alternative
constant pushing of the argument by passionate developers
I think cost savings would have played a part if our company were paying for the site licenses but in fact our customers were.
I look at this question like this. I work with the .NET framework. I could ask my employer to migrate to PHP. This is a disadvantage to me, as well as my company, for many reasons. Let's start with the obvious.
1.) I know PHP, but can do much more, and a lot faster, with .NET.
2.) Paying for a service, usually ensures a better experience. The Visual Studio IDE is second to NONE when developing an application.
3.) I can develop an application much faster in VS than hard-coding PHP.
4.) This is the most important one. If I work with a big company, I want my programmers to develop my app faster, and I expect it to run faster. PHP (an example Open Source language) is fast, and reliable, but if I can spend the money, I'll deploy ASP.NET.
Basically, big business, or even small business, wants to spend their money, as long as it's for a good reason. Your best bet is to say, 'Hey, if you want to deploy ASP.NET (or whatever), send me for some training. Then I'll be able to develop OUR application to my best ability'.
not to sound totally cynical, but:
an experienced developer probably would not approach management about something like this, unless he/she was already an expert with the open source package. Companies like to have a phone number to call and someone to blame when things don't work. Free open source packages do not provide this kind of 'accountability' (yes we know it's a joke, but management doesn't)
it is unlikely that management is going to listen to someone fresh out of college about any major purchasing or technology decision. You have to learn the business and earn everyone's respect first. [sorry!]
Same problem everywhere. Once an organization gets beyond a certain size (e.g., the Dunbar number) it starts to show a certain woodenheaded quality that will confound you. Lots of history, people, agendas that you aren't aware of. And getting everyone to agree on your solution is difficult.
Best to start locally. See if you can persuade your manager or PM to use SVN or CVS or GIT locally for a project and then get it to diffuse.
But that situation is true where I work as well. I use SVN locally for myself, but a commercial product for integrating with others.
Companies will use whatever will ultimately make them the most money. That means whatever software will make their employees more productive. If there is a particular piece of open source software you think they should use then when the time comes to purchase the software to do job X then as long as you can prove it will make the employees more productive and they are able to get reliable support just a phone call away as with commercial software then they will use it.
Big companies need to hire support staff for stuff like that. When they purchase software from a company, they are guaranteed support with the contract. Open source projects can die off a lot easier, whereas a large software vendor can be held responsible for much greater periods of time.
Every company has a culture, and fighting the culture can be something of an uphill battle. But if you're willing to try:
you'll likely have more luck getting BSD and BSD-like projects approved (MIT license, Apache, Boost, etc.); and it doesn't matter if most of the arguments against GPL and LGPL are mainly FUD
you should refer to the projects as "royalty-free"
you should make sure things are approved by somebody that can approve them (your direct manager) because putting the company in a bind -- especially when you're new -- (even if the "bind" is only in their head) is not conducive to long-term employment
you can probably go a long way by simply asking what the procedure is to choose a library or tool
From a configuration management perspective, having developers add free software stuff willy nilly whenever they feel like is a serious PITA to manage.
I've worked at companies where you were allowed to do it whenever you wanted and others where you could never do it.
There's definitely a balance to be found but if you're in a larger company with multiple projects, you do have to keep in mind that each time you add a new 'tool' it complicates the build process.
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While using Aptana and Eclipse for the first time in my programming life for PHP projects, I am wondering how these projects get funded. There is a lot of activity in the Eclipse community and the IDE itself is very good. I came across various Eclipse IDE sites and I am not able to decide which one is the official site of the Eclipse project. There is also news that the community is also working on dynamic language integration and one Aptana product is already out there.
How the full-time and part-time programmers get funded in these projects? I came to know that Aptana has withdrawn it's PHP support. Will Eclipse continue supporting PHP?
From the Eclipse "About" page:
The Eclipse Foundation is funded by
annual dues from our members and
governed by a Board of Directors.
Strategic Developers and Strategic
Consumers hold seats on this Board, as
do representatives elected by Add-in
Providers and Open Source committers.
The Foundation employs a full-time
professional staff to provide services
to the community but does not employ
the open source developers, called
committers, which actually work on the
Eclipse projects. Eclipse committers
are typically employed by
organizations or are independent
developers that volunteer their time
to work on an open source project.
Support for various languages in Eclipse is through Plugins. There are a number of plugins to provide PHP coding support.
Aptana on the other hand is a for profit company spun out of the Eclipse code base. I believe their current business model is selling hosting and support. They used to sell a "pro" edition of the editor, but I can't seem to find that anymore.
The homepage of the eclipse project is http://www.eclipse.org.
As to the funding: some programmers are paid (for example by IBM which originally started the eclipse project, or companies that use Eclipse as part of their own product or strategy), and as with almost all open-source projects a lot of programmers really just work in their free time on a part.
Eclipse consists of a rather small core, and a lot of plugins, which are all developed by different individuals.
Open source projects get funded because the companies and individuals involved believe that it is in their best interests. For some, it is a matter of building reputation so that they can sell services in other contexts. Some companies fund the Eclipse Foundation in exchange for goodwill, business opportunities, advertising, and whatnot.
Pragmatically, creating and running an open source project is a good way of bring like-minded individuals together to share a development burden. Much of what is created at Eclipse, for example, is infrastructure and frameworks upon which applications can be be built. If you think about it, most of the software we use contains tonnes of functionality that you only really care about if it isn't there. You probably don't use Eclipse because of the fantastic component model (OSGi referenced implementation), or the ability to stack views, manage editors, workbench, etc. However, if all those things weren't there, you probably wouldn't use Eclipse. In general, it's probably the case that upwards of 80% of the functionality in any given application just isn't all that interesting unless it's not there. Some 80% of functionality is "plumbing". So instead of having a dozen separate organizations each spend time and money building infrastructure/plumbing that the end user only cares about if it isn't there, these companies come together in open source to work together on those shared bits of infrastructure that they ultimately use to compete against each other in the marketplace. They do it in open source so as to invite additional like-minded organizations to participate.
Other organizations get involved with open source to help develop a market. If you think of all the millions of people who just use Eclipse. If some small number of them choose to buy a useful plug-in or two, that can turn into a good business.
Some organizations bet their business on the technology. Eclipse RCP, for example, is used by--literally--hundreds of organizations to deliver applications. If an organization depends so much on a technology, it makes sense to invest time, energy, and money in it to make sure that it continues to exist and grow.
Here's an article that I found interesting:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10387512-16.html?tag=mncol;title
There are other reasons, but these are some of my favourite.
Often projects like this are simply people with an interest giving their own time, sweat and tears to produce great software.
Some bigger ones (Mozilla Foundation) form non-profit organisations and may get donations. Mozilla gets millions of $s through their referral to Google in their search bar - every search from that to google counts for cash.
Very occasionally it's in a company's benefit to produce something open source and even pay their workers to work on it. Take Google Chrome for example. It makes sense for Google to make their browser, and indeed pay their employees for it. But to keep people trusting them, and to allow for other developers to play and add to it, they've released the source code in the Chromium project, and anyone can download, compile and use that.
In regards to Aptana - that's a company, and they write open source free plugins to Eclipse etc so that people can write for and use their products. It makes sense for them to contribute as they'll get something back. I can't see any reference to them pulling their support though, but you may well have better sources.
Hope that helps!
They outsource everything to offshore cubicles.