Programming Social Applications

Open Source Implementation

Small development shops, or any developers who want to take advantage of the vast community of engineers and knowledge in the social container and application development space, will find a lot of value in the open standard approach. Leveraging a community comprising some of the greatest minds in the space helps developers create powerful tools and specifications for any social container or application.

This approach has many benefits, including:

• The specifications and tools built within open source communities usually have numerous contributors, all of whom have different perspectives on the software. This approach lends itself well to building comprehensive solutions for a lot of the normal problems that would otherwise have to be custom developed through a proprietary approach.

• Open specifications are constantly in development. Unless your company is actively engaged in developing these specifications and tools, the upgrades and features are added independently of your company or product. This means that you do not need to devote engineering resources to upgrading the product with new features. When a new version is developed, the teams implementing the product simply need to revise their tools based on the requirements set forth by the specification. Even though you do have to allow for some development time in this approach, the issues related to security, features, and upgrades have already been solved and outlined within the specifications.

• The supporting ...