+<div class="entry">
+ <div class="title">
+ <a href="../../../Standardize_on_protocols_and_formats__not_vendors_and_applications.html">Standardize on protocols and formats, not vendors and applications</a>
+ </div>
+ <div class="date">
+ 2009-03-30 11:50
+ </div>
+
+ <div class="body">
+
+<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>
+
+ </div>
+ <div class="tags">
+
+
+
+ Tags: <a href="../../../tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="../../../tags/english">english</a>, <a href="../../../tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="../../../tags/standard">standard</a>.
+
+ </div>
+</div>
+ <div class="padding"></div>
+
projects / homepage.git / blobdiff