blog/Standardize_on_protocols_and_formats__not_vendors_and_applications.html

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   6     <title>Petter Reinholdtsen: Standardize on protocols and formats, not vendors and applications</title>
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  14  <h1>
  15      <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/">Petter Reinholdtsen</a>
  16
  17  </h1>
  18
  19 </div>
  20
  21
  22     <div class="entry">
  23       <div class="title">Standardize on protocols and formats, not vendors and applications</div>
  24       <div class="date">30th March 2009</div>
  25       <div class="body"><p>Where I work at the University of Oslo, one decision stand out as a
  26 very good one to form a long lived computer infrastructure.  It is the
  27 simple one, lost by many in todays computer industry: Standardize on
  28 open network protocols and open exchange/storage formats, not applications.
  29 Applications come and go, while protocols and files tend to stay, and
  30 thus one want to make it easy to change application and vendor, while
  31 avoiding conversion costs and locking users to a specific platform or
  32 application.</p>
  33
  34 <p>This approach make it possible to replace the client applications
  35 independently of the server applications.  One can even allow users to
  36 use several different applications as long as they handle the selected
  37 protocol and format.  In the normal case, only one client application
  38 is recommended and users only get help if they choose to use this
  39 application, but those that want to deviate from the easy path are not
  40 blocked from doing so.</p>
  41
  42 <p>It also allow us to replace the server side without forcing the
  43 users to replace their applications, and thus allow us to select the
  44 best server implementation at any moment, when scale and resouce
  45 requirements change.</p>
  46
  47 <p>I strongly recommend standardizing - on open network protocols and
  48 open formats, but I would never recommend standardizing on a single
  49 application that do not use open network protocol or open formats.</p>
  50 </div>
  51
  52       <div class="tags">Tags: <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/debian">debian</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/english">english</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/nuug">nuug</a>, <a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/tags/standard">standard</a>.</div>
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