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The history starts with that AssiDomän Frövi, a leading Carton maker in Sweden gives Sprawl Solution a project to evaluate the different Web Content Management Tools on the market. The reason behind this decision was that Sprawl Solution earlier had developed Frövis website (http://www.frovi.com) from scratch to a site recognised as the best in their market segment, and Frövi realized that without an effective tool for their employees to handle content they would not be able to keep the information and quality on the website up to date.
Evaluation of alternatives Scope of the evaluation project was to evaluate the pro and cons for ten different alternatives on the market, mainly commercial platforms but also open source platforms and one alternative based on a custom developed solution. The custom alternative was based on the participants experience in several custom and commercial platforms.
Finalists The evaluation was performed and presented, and after thorough discussions two alternatives were selected for the final detail review. One was one of the commercial platforms in the mid-range market and the other was the custom made solution.
The winning alternative
After a deeper analysis and evaluation of the two alternatives Frövi decided to go for the custom developed solution. The reason that Frövi choose the custom developed solution was
- The platform must be able to run on Linux-based systems. This demand was due to the low cost and high level of security of a linux-installation. AssiDomän Frövi also preferred Linux for the stability of this platform regarding to Microsofts IIS and had quite a scope of running Linux installations. This demand filtered out a large number of commercial alternatives in the price-range they regarded.
- The turbulent situation on the commercial platform market, with the perceived risk that many of the commercial vendor could be forced to leave the market made them feel safer with better control of a custom made solution.
- The need to be able to develop custom functionality when needed (not pay for it in advance), and the possibility to integrate to other mission critical systems within Frövi made the full access to the source code very valuable. Java as programming language was the preferred base, depending on the high portability, flexible, stabile and adopted language for Open Source development. The ability to use tools who is not depending on one single player (vendor) influenced the choice.
- Other competent open source alternatives like Open CMS and Zope felt either conceptually wrong or to immature or complex to start working on. A very important factor was that many of these Open Source platforms are technically very competent but need a lot of work done before it suits the customer in maintenance, usability and other soft aspects. We wanted to make a platform that had all the technical aspects but also got the rest of it right to.
- The cost of develop a solution fitted for their need was only slightly higher than customizing a commercial platform. Also the fact that no annual license fee is connected to an own developed solution influenced this decision.
Project starts A joint project team was set up in August 2002 with
- Sten Tynander, Frövi as project owner
- Per Wennman , Sprawl Solutions as project leader
- Mattias Bogeblad, Sprawl Solutions as system architect and lead programmer
- Stefan Sik , Frövi as programmer
- Magnus Guvenal, Frövi as DBA and programmer
- Helena Säfverström, Sprawl Solutions as Art Director
In the beginning of the project a large amount of time was spent on detailing the system architecture and the use-cases for all wanted functionality, these were documented, reviewed and finally agreed upon as a good base for starting the development effort. An overview of the architecture is shown below. As the developers are already involved in the open source community and have utilized several open source components before it was only natural to build the architecture using many of these frameworks. This reuse enabled us to get a lot of functionality up fast for free. We also took care to make each framework exchangeable if it did not measure up later on in the process.
Figure 1 Initial Proposed Components
Development phase
With a good system architecture and detailed use-cases for the wanted functionality the coding of the application progressed fast. Developing the design for the user interface was a snap for Helena , having a number of use-cases with wire frame screens showing the complete application flow.In January 2003 the project delivered the platform to AssiDomän Frövi.
The idea of Open Source is maturing
Almost all of the project participants have had good experience of open source software earlier. The discussion now started if we should make the developed WCMS platform an open source platform or what should happen to it. After thinking about this issue from both Sprawl Solutions consultant perspective and AssiDomän Frövi's industrial perspective we took the joint decision in February 2003 to make it open source, and the platform was released under the name InfoGlue.
The reasons to make the platform open source from Sprawl Solutions perspective were:
- In line with our strategy to be a pure system integrator, selling our knowledge only and not any products.
- The potential spin-off effects an open source platform could give us in form of market knowledge and new projects.
- A desire to pay back to the open source community that have provided us and our customers with such excellent tools and frameworks to build rock solid applications with.
- The personal excitement of individuals to be part of an open source initiative.
- The conviction that the platform would gain much better acceptance and reach a far better market penetration if many consultant firms were offering it to their clients. That would spill of in a larger community and a better and faster developed platform if handled right.
The reasons to make the platform open source from AssiDomän Frövi's perspective were:
- Contribute to Open Source in a time when licenses cost rapidly increase and beginning to be a critical burden for budgets of all IT Managers and crucial influence the ongoing system development and business opportunities.
- Goodwill for AssiDomän Frövi.
- Be active part of the Open Source community, and learn more about the "free code" possibilities and strength.
- Develop and sell Web Content Tools is not part of the core business area, it is to "Be perceived as the best supplier of Cartonboard by customers in well-defined segments".
The results of all these efforts are now available for you to use and modify at no charge. Isn't that nice!
The InfoGlue team also invites and urges you to participate in the exciting journey ahead of making the platform even better onwards. If you are not in the business of selling WCMS software but are interested in getting a powerful and competent Web Content Management platform to use, why not join us in our effort!
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