Pdf: Right Up There With Cobol
And this is a good thing.
And this is a good thing.
PDF is an amazing document format: it is both backward and forward
compatible:
PDF 1.1 files from 1993 can still be perfectly understood by today's
PDF tools
PDF files created by today's tools can still be viewed by older PDF
software
Could this be one of the reasons, along with technological soundness, why
PDF is ubiquitous?
What other parts of our industry can claim such success without leaving data
or customers behind every three years after "upgrade season"?
Not Google
A few years back Google offered a very simple
Google SOAP Search API to allow 3rd parties to easily use the Google
search engine to add native search to their websites. By native, I mean no
ads from Google and 100% custom UI. We used this API as a quick fix to get
search on the
Solid Documents web site. In 2006, Google "deprecated" this API and required web developers
to migrate to their new and improved AJAX version of the same thing. in
August 2009, the API will cease to function altogether.
To be fair, the service was free. However, that's supposed to be the
benefit of going with Google rather than Microsoft. It is hardly a benefit
if they pull the rug out from under you. The least they could have done was
provide some sort of legacy wrapper for the new API.
If you cannot rely on an API to exist for the life of your business, then it
would be foolish to build your infrastructure on it. Luckily search was a
cheap way for us to learn to steer well clear of any "enterprise" offerings
from Google in future. No, we will not be using Google Apps (the
"enterprise" version of GMail plus Google Docs). And we certainly will not
be building anything using the
Google App Engine. I don't care how cool it is: I'm willing to bet that
your app will no longer be running in 10 years from now. This Blog uses a
free service acquired by Google. Hmm....
Not Microsoft
What set me off on this tirade was our hosted Exchange upgrade this week. We
drank the Kool-Aid and outsourced 'generic' parts of our IT including our
e-mail. This week they upgraded us from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2007.
On the positive side, they didn't lose my e-mail. However, the transition
has been anything but smooth. It included instructions like clearing your
Blackberry to 'out of box' state. In other words, assuming that the only
thing you do with your Blackberry is use it as a client for their e-mail
server. Most people I know have at least one other app that they regularly
use on their Blackberry ("telephone" anyone?). So, plenty of time was wasted
backing up and restoring address books and re-installing 3rd party
applications.
Pretty much the only thing that worked after the transition was e-mail. One
of the primary reasons we originally switched from our own simple open
source e-mail server to Exchange was to take advantage of collaborative
features of Outlook like shared calendars and address books. None of that
worked after the transition.
If it ain't broke
..
.. don't fix it! One of the key features expected from any "Enterprise
Solution" should be longevity. Just like railways and roads, one should
expect a bit of maintenence over the lifetime of the tool but one does not
expect to have to toss the whole thing out and replace it every 4 years.
Some of the open source projects deal with this issue a little better but
that's not all roses either: anyone else remember the upgrade to PHP 5 or is
it just me?
I understand that sometimes you need to throw out the legacy to make
progress. Shutting down analog TV in the US is a great example of this.
However, when it comes to expectations for enterprise business solutions, 4
years is a very low bar. For Exchange, part of the blame goes to Apptix and
part to Microsoft:
When I look for Exchange 2003 on Microsoft's site I'm redirected to
the Exchange 2010 pages. You have to dig deep on technet to find 2003
info. Even then, it is not clear how long Microsoft intends to support it.
Apptix should have offered the 2007 migration as an option rather than
a compulsory disruption to all of their clients and their businesses. Part
of their plan should have been to keep running Exchange 2003 for
Luddites like me.
Remind me again what the benefit of the 2007 upgrade was?
In the event that breaking changes to an API, file format or service are
unavoidable, a responsible enterprise service provider will provide a
smooth transition path to their customers.
Back to Solid PDF
Aside from one small change in the way table reconstruction worked in a very
early version of
Solid Converter PDF, the publically exposed APIs of our SDK have
remained constant for 7 years now. That first minor change we made taught us
our lesson: even as we've migrated from a COM SDK to our more recent
.NET Solid Framework, we've taken great care to avoid breaking customer
apps that rely on our older APIs.
When we released
Solid
Script, our command line syntax for our desktop applications had to
change but we offered a legacy wrapper that translates old command lines
into the newer scripts. Even this is not a big issue though since the
software we created 7 years ago still works just as well as it did the day
it was purchased. No forced upgrades due to changing file formats or
'deprecated' APIs.
When
PDF/A was announced in 2005 we immediately recognized the value this
added to an already awesome file format and decided to make archiving
functionality one of the pillars of our business. The PDF/A standard
underlines the already proven long term vision we have for both customer
documents and PDF products:
Think 40 years, not 4 years
Think incremental non-breaking improvements, not disruptive change
Wouldn't it be grand if the bigger players had a similar definition of
long term? With all the focus today on sustainability on conservation, why
do they continue to waste our time, money and energy?
by: same
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