A Path Less Taken

At work lately I’ve been encountering a lot of Business Process Management or BPM tools in disguise. It got me to wondering if the open source community is active in this area. I found this blog post which suggests maybe. These do appear to be mostly free, but they have commercial companies around them which always complicates the issue.

Today my colleague pointed out a commercial RAD tool that was very promising. It’s called outsystems Agility Platform and it is worth a look if you are in the market for this kind of solution.

What does all this mean? Nothing maybe. Eventually it could spell the end to the software engineering profession as it exists today. I doubt that will be tomorrow, but it could happen. Wouldn’t that make for an interesting world?

It is the plight of the modern software engineer to know that there is always more than one way to solve a problem. Often we struggle with trade offs between usability (our own) and performance (the users). Eventually we individually or collectively chose “something” only to find that a single choice then cascades through our entire solution. If you don’t believe me you can validate this for yourself. Just ask a software engineer their “best practices” for managing dates and date logic and watch their eyes roll.

If you are an open source developer and you have not been living under a rock for years (yes, I know, many have) then you have probably heard of git. Billing itself as “the fast version control system“, git is the distributed version control management system that has become the darling of the hour. It allows developers to work on-line and off-line, to host repositories locally or on the now popular github, to perform merges as the rule rather than the exception. In short, git is to version control what WordPress is to blogging. The eight hundred pound gorilla in a small room.

I like the idea of open source software. I even want to contribute to the cause when I can find an effort that I can connect with and where I can make a difference. The big problem I run into is what can I do with open source? There seem to be a few licenses out there that are in common use and they are not all created equal. I’m all about giving, but sometimes a fellow has to eat too. How do you figure out what you can and cannot do under an open source license? I decided to give the research a shot and see what I can come up with. I figured I would look at big open source projects, see what licenses they use and then research those licenses. Simple, right? We will see.

Although I’m sure there are more than this, here is quick run down on some PHP ORM solutions that I was able to find with limited searching. The first 2 seem to be the most popular ones. If you know of another good solution please post a comment.

• Doctrine
• Propel
• Outlet
• RedBean
• dORM
• Jelly
• Kohana ORM
• Sprig
• LightORM
• Flourish ORM
• php-activerecord
• CoughPHP
• Torpor