Next Generation Internet applications, assembly as a methodology, and open source are related to each other in important ways. It’s the combination of the three that really enables the rapid delivery, business agility, and innovation that businesses need on the web today.
Open source applications and frameworks make possible as assembly methodology. Although Optaros often works in a hybrid stack, leveraging some open source frameworks alongside commercial software and services, in order to create the optimal solution for a given client, the core flexibility to assemble – and to customize the application to best fit business need – is most effectively and clearly granted by an open source license. (You could theoretically assemble an application using proprietary and custom software, but you’d quickly find most proprietary packages do not expect you to modify their code in the process of deploying, and many simply will not allow it).
Additionally, assembly is the most effective methodology for building next generation Internet applications. Assembly enables rapid prototyping and change, without the long and documentation driven design phases of traditional custom development. Because next generation web applications focus on innovation, the ability to change “on the fly” is a critical success factor.
Finally, and critically, the culture of interaction and innovation that characterizes the next generation of Internet applications has long been driven by the open source community. Blogs, wikis, rss, microformats, mass global collaboration: the “reference” implementations in each of these derive from open source communities. (Look at how long it has taken enterprise content management vendors to come to grips with user contributed content in web CMS systems). It isn’t just that most popular web 2.0 properties run on open source stacks, but that they engage with open source development communities, contribute to them, and learn from them.
Application development teams not able to make full use of open source and leverage assembly-based methodologies are at a disadvantage before they even begin to write code.
