- <item>
- <title>Standardize on protocols and formats, not vendors and applications</title>
- <link>Standardize_on_protocols_and_formats__not_vendors_and_applications.html</link>
- <guid isPermaLink="true">Standardize_on_protocols_and_formats__not_vendors_and_applications.html</guid>
- <pubDate>Mon, 30 Mar 2009 11:50:00 +0200</pubDate>
- <description>
-<p>Where I work at the University of Oslo, one decision stand out as a
-very good one to form a long lived computer infrastructure. It is the
-simple one, lost by many in todays computer industry: Standardize on
-open network protocols and open exchange/storage formats, not applications.
-Applications come and go, while protocols and files tend to stay, and
-thus one want to make it easy to change application and vendor, while
-avoiding conversion costs and locking users to a specific platform or
-application.</p>
-
-<p>This approach make it possible to replace the client applications
-independently of the server applications. One can even allow users to
-use several different applications as long as they handle the selected
-protocol and format. In the normal case, only one client application
-is recommended and users only get help if they choose to use this
-application, but those that want to deviate from the easy path are not
-blocked from doing so.</p>
-
-<p>It also allow us to replace the server side without forcing the
-users to replace their applications, and thus allow us to select the
-best server implementation at any moment, when scale and resouce
-requirements change.</p>
-
-<p>I strongly recommend standardizing - on open network protocols and
-open formats, but I would never recommend standardizing on a single
-application that do not use open network protocol or open formats.</p>
-</description>
- </item>
-