Thoughts on Abandoning Proprietary Framework for A Larger Open Source Project?

My company is in the same sort of situation. We have a custom developed framework in Perl that never seems to get quite as much attention paid to developing new features and fixing bugs as the open source frameworks do. I and most other developers would love to switch to something open source for the benefits you mention, but nobody has the budget to spend the time porting code over.

Our current plan is to use an open source framework if we have any small, new projects come up, and if that's successful consider moving older apps over I've mostly worked with Perl and Ruby, but a trend I'm seeing more of these days is frameworks allowing you to mix and match framework core components. For example, we're considering integrating parts of our custom framework into Catalyst That way we can still use some of our custom developed code components (our own DBI class and some Mason templates) and porting our applications won't be as difficult Ruby on Rails is also moving in the direction of being more modular Perhaps there's a PHP framework that might allow you to use some of your code, or at least make it easier to shoehorn some of your code into the framework instead of starting from scratch. Googling I see most of the PHP frameworks claim to be modular, but some appear to just allow you to develop add-ons, not swap out core components Sounds like you're doing some good analysis and I wish you luck in your search.

My company is in the same sort of situation. We have a custom developed framework in Perl that never seems to get quite as much attention paid to developing new features and fixing bugs as the open source frameworks do. I and most other developers would love to switch to something open source for the benefits you mention, but nobody has the budget to spend the time porting code over.

Our current plan is to use an open source framework if we have any small, new projects come up, and if that's successful consider moving older apps over. I've mostly worked with Perl and Ruby, but a trend I'm seeing more of these days is frameworks allowing you to mix and match framework core components. For example, we're considering integrating parts of our custom framework into Catalyst.

That way we can still use some of our custom developed code components (our own DBI class and some Mason templates) and porting our applications won't be as difficult. Ruby on Rails is also moving in the direction of being more modular. Perhaps there's a PHP framework that might allow you to use some of your code, or at least make it easier to shoehorn some of your code into the framework instead of starting from scratch.

Googling I see most of the PHP frameworks claim to be modular, but some appear to just allow you to develop add-ons, not swap out core components. Sounds like you're doing some good analysis and I wish you luck in your search.

I feel more and more like this might be the way we have to go with a lot of our custom code and luckily a good deal of our models are built good and solid so we should be able to do what you mention and maybe use Zend Framework, etc..., and just port our largest parts over to it and then rebuild the smaller parts from scratch. Doing a compromise such as thing might be a great idea, not sure why that hadn't occurred to me that we could get away a bit easier this way. – LokNessMobster Dec 3 '09 at 2:33.

Your question is really devilishly biased, because all pro's are long-term and all con's short-term development pains. :) But if the situation is even half as much as you describe, switching is the right thing and will save a lot of money in the long run.

I agree, it is horribly biased. For the most part, like you say, I am already made up in my head that we should switch the code and that it is the right thing to do but I wanted to get answers like you are saying as both reassurance and in case I am just forgetting simple things. I have gotten some great feedback already from this and I think there are other people in our shoes that will also get a lot from this question.

– LokNessMobster Dec 3 '09 at 2:44.

I think the most important points you highlighted here. The decision now, should be based, on numbers. Technically your analysis is perfect.

What I would ask now is: How much it would cost for your company,to: * keep your app to take advantage of new php improvements without break your old code (it means: architecture analysis, development and test, test, test). * Do you have any developer/analyst focused in security development? (it means: security development life cycle, test, test, test).

* Do you have a development methodology? Normally those frameworks are kept under a good distributed development methodology. I had the same question than you sometime ago, and my company decided to choose a framework, migrate our code, allocate 2 developers 1 day per week to work on the framework.To put our team to work with the framework development team was good, because we learned more about the framework, we helped the community (demagogy :-)) and we could add some business requirements in the framework features road map ;-).

I agree as far as porting with being able to spend the same amount of time we spend maintaining our code to give back to others is great. That would be something that I would find really fulfilling and I think our team would too. Both for reasons of helping out and for the celebrity of it!

:) Hard to get recognition when no one ever sees the code! – LokNessMobster Dec 3 '09 at 2:42 The question, that just you will be able to answer: how many time you will take to rewrite your codebase. Another important things about frameworks.

You can find professionals that knows it already. It is a huge advantage comparing with a home-made-undocumented-framework. – VP.

Dec 3 '09 at 8:47.

I and my team are nearing completion of porting an existing application across to run on Zend Framework and it's gone quite well. The old application had a lot of issues that were going to be big problems to fix and we decided to take the plunge and rebuilt it in ZF. It has however taken a long time to port, I would estimate for our application it's taken us a good 4-5 months of dev to port everything across (we have taken the opportunity to rejigg the database and other areas of the system).

If you do go for it then be prepared to explain to your bosses why you need to spend a good chunk of time porting rather than working on income generating work. We were lucky to be able to use a new project as the impetus to carrying out all this work.

I think we are also looking at months of development to convert also. We do have the luxury of doing it while we still support the other code base. – LokNessMobster Dec 3 '09 at 2:29 For us I would say it has been worth it, our application was creaking under it's own weight and it was becoming extremely brittle.

Rebuilding from ground up with unit testing bolted in at all levels is making subsequent development much nicer. Also we built the original app in php 4.0 with custom database wrappers and a lot of embedded sql, fairly yucky stuff. – Matt Wheeler Dec 4 '09 at 0:43.

I see a couple of cons of switching over. First, of course, there's: We will have to port all the existing code we have in our custom application to the new system Followed by: We will have to port all the existing code we have in our custom application to the new system and, last, but, not least: We will have to port all the existing code we have in our custom application to the new system You were talking about "money in the overhead column", and rewriting working tested code in to new working tested code doesn't add a whole lot of value. If you're talking about introducing a new framework for a brand new, unrelated project, or one that uses little of the existing code base, then, sure, knock yourself out.

That's a fine opportunity to switch frameworks, platforms, languages, etc. But an existing, shipping, mature code base with existing knowledgeable folks working on it? That's a hard pill to swallow, personally. If you want folks to follow standards and conventions, then ... follow standards and conventions.

Since you have a system that allows folks the "freedom to what they want", make "following standards and conventions" something they want to do. It's always better to transition a system incrementally that throw the whole baby, bathwater, soap, basin and towels out the window just to go back and redo the exact same thing again. Everyone wants to rewrite code, I want to do it.

Our framework needs a "do over" here. But then we go "yea, but..." and what do we get in the end? N Months of effort to get back to where we are now.

That doesn't do much in a world where time to market matters.

This is pretty much how I feel too, I want to redo a lot of it over but then I start thinking about all the time needed. The bad part about wanting the restriction of it is that I know how much it gets in the way a lot of the time, like it did for me in Rails. I think we can try to enforce conventions in our code but I feel like without the framework enforcing it that we may still have people avoid things, hate to have to get irritated at someone over something like that, even though it is a big deal to me.

Thanks for the answer and I agree that the effort might not be worth the investment – LokNessMobster Dec 3 '09 at 2:26.

I cant really gove you an answer,but what I can give you is a way to a solution, that is you have to find the anglde that you relate to or peaks your interest. A good paper is one that people get drawn into because it reaches them ln some way.As for me WW11 to me, I think of the holocaust and the effect it had on the survivors, their families and those who stood by and did nothing until it was too late.