Marijane,

It also makes sense to examine the available software for what you  
wish to accomplish.  Available software goes beyond current features to
- maintainability  (one reason Stanford switched to Blacklight)   I'll  
talk a little bit about this in our Code4Lib 2010 presentation about  
testing.
- community
- active development
- potential applicability to additional projects.   (we like  
Blacklight for its ability to run on any solr index, regardless of  
what's in there)

probably some other stuff I've left out.

Our experience at Stanford Libraries is that the common conventions of  
Rails give us a lot more ease in reading each others' code.

- Naomi

On Jan 5, 2010, at 3:04 PM, marijane white wrote:

> Greetings Code4Lib,
>
> Long time lurker, first time poster here.
>
> I've been turning over this question in my mind for a few weeks now,  
> and Joe
> Hourcle's postscript in the Online PHP Course thread has prompted me  
> to
> finally try to ask it. =)
>
> I'm interested in hearing how the members of this list have gone about
> choosing development platforms for their library coding projects and/ 
> or
> existing open source projects (ie like VuFind vs Blacklight).  For  
> example,
> did you choose a language you already were familiar with?  One you  
> wanted to
> learn more about?  Does your workplace have a standard enterprise
> architecture/platform that you are required to use?  If you have  
> chosen to
> implement an existing open source project, did you choose based on the
> development platform or project maturity and features or something  
> else?
>
> Some background -- thanks to my undergraduate computer engineering  
> studies,
> I have a pretty solid understanding of programming fundamentals, but  
> most of
> my pre-LIS work experience was in software testing and did not  
> require me to
> employ much of what I learned programming-wise, so I've mostly  
> dabbled over
> the last decade or so.  I've got a bit of experience with a bunch of
> languages and I'm not married to any of them.   I also kind of like  
> having
> excuses to learn new ones.
>
> My situation is this: I would like to eventually implement a  
> discovery tool
> at MPOW, but I am having a hell of a time choosing one.  I'm a solo
> librarian on a content team at a software and information services  
> company,
> so I'm not really tied to the platforms used by the software  
> engineering
> teams here.  I know a bit of Ruby, so I've played with Blacklight  
> some, got
> it to install on Windows and managed to import a really rough Solr  
> index.
> I'm more attracted to the features in VuFind, but I don't know much  
> PHP yet
> and I haven't gotten it installed successfully yet.  My collection's
> metadata is not in an ILS (yet) and not in MARC, so I've also  
> considered
> trying out more generic approaches like ajax-solr (though I don't  
> know a lot
> of javascript yet, either).  I've also given a cursory look at SOPAC  
> and
> Scriblio.  My options are wide open, and I'm having a rough time  
> deciding
> what direction to go in.  I guess it's kind of similar to someone  
> who is new
> to programming and attempting to choose their first language to learn.
>
> I will attempt to head off a programming language religious war =) by
> stating that I'm not really interested in the virtues of one  
> platform over
> another, moreso the abstract reasons one might have for selecting one.
> Have any of you ever been in a similar situation?  How'd you get  
> yourself
> unstuck?  If you haven't, what do you think you might do in a  
> situation like
> mine?
>
>
> -marijane