[CS-FSLUG] Your Mission Dream

[Alan Trick]

On Mon, 2006-04-03 at 11:01 -0500, Tim Young wrote:
> Thanks, Kelly.  We do our best to find similar projects and help the 
> ones that do fit the need of the greater missions body. (see 
> http://CODN.net)  There are few missions projects that are not currently 
> being developed by others, which we have started.  One of them, Kardia 
> (<) has a number of similar type projects.  But the scope of 
> Kardia and the technology being used is drastically different.  Kardia 
> should be able to be used by a start-up mission, until it is quite 
> huge.  We have watched a lot of the "scaling" problems throughout the 
> years, and realize that there are a few technologies that should be used 
> instead of what most people choose to use.  :)  Ie, open database 
> standards (use any database back-end), and an infrastructure that allows 
> you to plug in different technologies as they emerge (RSS, XML, bar-code 
> readers, etc.).  Most projects focus on the current end use, we are 
> focusing on building an environment which can grow as technology (and 
> the mission) changes.
> 
> So, that is one example of a project that we have gone off and developed 
> something other than was already being done.  There are a few missions 
> database programs available, but none that are scalable as the mission 
> grows.
> 
> But most of the time we can use existing open-source software.  If you 
> look at CODN, you will see that we are not re-inventing the wheel, but 
> rather trying to list projects that people host elsewhere.  (CODN, by 
> the way, is stalled.  Our original web-page, which has more content and 
> information, is still available here: http://www.fieldsync.com/wiki/)

The mission I work for (Wycliffe/SIL/Jaars) is slowly moving towards an
Open Source base. The big part of it is to enable mother-tongue
translators who don't have the money for expensive stuff.

I think missions tend to a fair number of unique needs, so one of the
large hurdles is the disconnect between the computer people and the
end-users. The fact that these two groups are often in different
countries doesn't help either.

Probably one way to tackle the problems involved would be to split up
software. To me Kardia seems to be overly ambitious. By splitting things
up you can make it easier to distribute the work. Also it generaly
forces more documentation and stricter testing (otherwise the parts
won't be able to work together) and encourages reuse. That also helps to
keep applications less messy as they develop over time.

Now, if only I had a second life to do more programming in :)

Alan Trick.

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around 
http://mail.yahoo.com