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Build vs. Buy is an old dilemma. I find the answer to be rather simple. If you find a product that:
- Meets all of your criteria
- Will not require modification to meet the criteria
- Is within your budget
Then the choice is clear. Get that product and feel good about it.
The obvious time to build is even more simple. If you can’t find anything that comes close to what you need, put your construction hat on.
The 3rd option is more complicated. You will often not find any exact matches for your requirements, but you’ll find a few that are close. Then it will take some evaluation into how deep the changes will go into the original product. In general I advise AGAINST getting a product that you cannot use right away as intended. For many commercial products, you have much more leverage as a potential customer than a supported one. Present your issues to a sales engineer and make them come up with how their product will support your requirements, in writing.
If you decide to get a product and retrofit it to your needs, you are running some pretty high risks. The risks are:
- You will no longer be supported by the owners of that product.
- You won’t be able to take advantage of future releases without retrofitting them as well.
- Any published user extensions will not be compatible with your version with some added effort.
- Over time you version is cannot be recognized or reconciled with the original.
This can be an option if you want to jump start your development and have an appropriately sized full time development staff to maintain it for the rest of the products lifespan.
If you have a development team and a little more lead time to get your product ready, I suggest another approach. Build your product from components that you don’t need to change. Evaluate several lower level applications and development frameworks to assemble exactly what you nee. This will allow you to still take advantage of upgrades and extensions for the various components while still meeting your very specific needs.
This advice comes from analyzing a lot of past experiences, I hope that it can be beneficail to someone else.
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What used to be my fun side projects has quickly become my job. I’d like to continue that cycle by finding new side projects that are fun and challenging. I also like to find projects that I actually think would be something new and interesting that people would appreciate. An idea came to me recently […]
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I had a need to create an extension to IE. When I did my initial research I couldn’t find anything that seemed to address the subject. Since Internet Explorer is the most commonly used browser on the internet I knew I was doing something wrong. Apparently I didn’t even know the propper terminology to use […]
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I have contributed to open source projects ever since I knew what the term meant. I didn’t see the real benefits until I created my own projects, or completed modules for existing projects. Now that I have been doing that for over a year I want other developers and their employers to know the joys […]
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I have been working with eyeOS lately. I hacked around with some of the existing components, and developed one of my own. I can tell you that after researching every “Web Desktop” and “Virtual Desktop” I could find reference to, this is the best one that you can download and manipulate under an open source […]
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I have been working on some very challenging projects recently that require retrieving remote pages, manipulating them and then sending them back to the user. There are several problems with this scenario:
Due to a bunch of greedy and malicious hacks, many of the obvious and easier techniques are blocked by necessary security measures.
Whenever you deal […]
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I have just completed a project using Mootools exclusively for the javascript.
SELECTORS:
I found the $ and $$ selectors to be extremely useful. The $selector will return a single object based off of a name. The $$ selector will return an array of objects to work with based off of CSS selectors and more. The $$ […]
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If you are interested in programming with pure ActionScript 3 code, there is a decent Open Source alternative to Flex, Flash and others. Like most products and especially open source ones, they can be a bit quirky to get started in. So here is a quick guide to get started using Flash Develop for ActionScript […]
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Here is some code to get you off the ground in Actionscript only programming, in combination with the link I previously provided.
Run Flex Builder, create a new ActionScript Project. Name it whatever you like.
Change the name of the .as file to Main.as
Right click in the navigator window and create a new Actionscript file and name […]
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With the introduction of Actionscript 3.0 I’m going to try to implement some ideas that wouldn’t have performed as well in Actionscript 2.0. Also, now that Actionscript has matured to the point where I’m more familiar with the syntax and methodologies I’m more comfortable in approaching it. I’m much more comfortable with code than the […]
