blog/data/2009-02-18-protokoll-og-format.txt

   1 Title: Standardize on protocols and formats, not vendors and applications
   2 Tags: english, nuug, standard, debian
   3 Date: 2009-03-30 11:50
   4 Publish: 2009-03-30
   5
   6 <p>Where I work at the University of Oslo, one decision stand out as a
   7 very good one to form a long lived computer infrastructure.  It is the
   8 simple one, lost by many in todays computer industry: Standardize on
   9 open network protocols and open exchange/storage formats, not applications.
  10 Applications come and go, while protocols and files tend to stay, and
  11 thus one want to make it easy to change application and vendor, while
  12 avoiding conversion costs and locking users to a specific platform or
  13 application.</p>
  14
  15 <p>This approach make it possible to replace the client applications
  16 independently of the server applications.  One can even allow users to
  17 use several different applications as long as they handle the selected
  18 protocol and format.  In the normal case, only one client application
  19 is recommended and users only get help if they choose to use this
  20 application, but those that want to deviate from the easy path are not
  21 blocked from doing so.</p>
  22
  23 <p>It also allow us to replace the server side without forcing the
  24 users to replace their applications, and thus allow us to select the
  25 best server implementation at any moment, when scale and resouce
  26 requirements change.</p>
  27
  28 <p>I strongly recommend standardizing - on open network protocols and
  29 open formats, but I would never recommend standardizing on a single
  30 application that do not use open network protocol or open formats.</p>