Entries categorized as ‘Technology foundation’
The good news with Cloud Computing is that our clients don’t have to sink precious capital into building or finding a data center or buying servers.
The bad news — at least the concern — is lock-in. Is a business locked in once they have grown? Do we have choices in case Amazon (or whoever) decides to raise their prices? Will the customers be able to take their business elsewhere if that happens?
There are a number of vendors out there providing cloud computing services:
- Amazon, of course.
- Rackspace
- GoGrid
Others will follow. IBM has made announcements regarding Cloud Labs, Microsoft is working on Azure, etc. But I want to focus on Amazon, Rackspace and GoGrid in this post. They offer services that are somewhat analogous, each has the equivalents of S3 and EC2. (more…)
Categories: Technology Strategy · Technology foundation
Tagged: Amazon AWS, Building Web Applications, GoGrid, Microsoft Azure, Rackspace, SaaS, Software as a Service
So you want to build a web site with social networking as one of its components? You can start with a social networking foundation and build a web site around it, or you can start with a web site content management solution and add social networking to it.
My purpose in this post is to gather the ingredients — the pasta and the sauce, if you will — and leave the preparation for another post. The assumption here is that the basic web site is the pasta and social networking is the sauce. Of course, it could be the other way round, depending on your business.
The most important thing is to be able to integrate the two parts.
Content Management
Content Management has been around longer and is more stable. Ric Shreves did a comprehensive study of the solutions in this space last summer. His conclusion: the top 3 systems are WordPress, Joomla and Drupal. Wikipedia’s list of content management systems is more exhaustive but less evaluative in its approach. My key take-away here is that the top 3 CMS systems are all based on PHP. That settles the programming language wars as far as I am concerned.
Social Networking
Here is a quick summary of technology solutions relative to social networking:
Finally, the startup factor. What’s the solution that is commandeering startup money? I searched venture sites Xconomy and YouNoodle, looking for startups using the technologies mentioned above. The conclusion: Drupal (3½, Acquia, GoingOn, SocialActions(½), Halosys), WordPress(2, PayBox and Insoshi) and Joomla(0).
So what do we recommend? That’s another discussion because it depends on the requirements.
Categories: Technology foundation
Tagged: Content Management, Social Networking
We have implemented DynamSoft’s SourceAnywhere Hosted as our source control system.
Since our business model calls for being able to assemble teams and have them become productive very quickly, having a SaaS source code control system was very important to us. SourceAnywhere allows us the flexibility to expand our network on short order.
During our evaluation process, we looked into a number of tools. In the end, the factors that won us over to DynamSoft were
- Its Eclipse integration and
- The ease of setup.
Most source code control systems integrate with Eclipse but setup can be a bear. We do a lot of development in Python. Some of the source control tools are built using Python as well — as Murphy would have it, they were different. We had to make sure the library versions of our code didn’t inadvertently intermingle with the library versions of the source control system. Setting up Dynamsoft’s solution was 1-2-3 by comparison.
No software development team can afford mishaps in source control. It has to just work. SourceAnywhere does that for us.
Categories: Technology foundation
Tagged: SaaS, Software as a Service, Source Control
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