[olug] Real opportunity for getting Open Source into the Enterprise

[Daniel Pfile]

On Monday, November 25, 2002, at 11:02 PM, Andrew Holm-Hansen wrote:

> I don't know PHP but I know enough Java to get a servlet container to 
> do the job.  I've gotten a sort of similar app working using a 
> Postgres backend and Tomcat as the servlet container.

The reason I brought up php is most people know it, and it's low system 
requirements. Java servlets would be fine as well, I've never written a 
large project in it, but I've got all the books and I'd love to give it 
a shot. I actually debugged some servlet code (not mine) tonight even, 
so maybe I'm underestimating my skills...

Also, a friend of mine who's a big delphi hacker (I know.. I know..) Is 
looking to get into java, since he realizes delphi isn't a way to 
maintain marketability. I bet he'd love an excuse to hack out some java 
code for the experience of it. I'm not much a 'traditional' programer 
(more of a sysadmin) but I love programming, and would pick up the 
project for similar reasons.

> I've also done some data conversion, though depending on the schemas 
> and the amount of data to be converted I may decide to punt on this 
> particular project.
> I'm willing, and I may even be able!

Agreed, the scale of the project and the state of the old data is a big 
sticking point for me. I did a conversion project a few years ago, and 
the biggest problem with flaws in the way the data (old dbf files) was 
set up. It worked great on the old system, and great on ours, till we 
tried to bring up record 12,384 for example and found out it was 
corrupt, and there were lots more that way...

Sourceforge could give us a nice place to set up cvs/docs/etc, and I'm 
sure all of us could set up a tomcat/postgres setup on our respective 
development machines to test on.

-- Daniel