[BW-dev-discussion] Is it important to adopt a new framework before proceeding?

[Tobias Brox]

On 22 August 2010 14:47, Peter Lind <peter.e.lind at gmail.com> wrote:
> This avoids a big-bang strategy (one of the most likely risks of
> failure for the project) while easing developers in.

I don't know much about the bwrox application ... but I agree quite
much to that, I've witnesses several failures or near-failures from
when the programmers have become fed up with the mess, and tried to
reimplement a project from scratch.  The new code will most likely
miss some of the old features and will be with more bugs.  The users
will see only the drawbacks, not the benefits with the "new and clean
code", and the programmers will become disencouraged because the users
prefers to run the old code.

Then again ... isn't it slightly ironical, that one of the reasons
stated why "bwrox sucks" is exactly because one has several times
attempted to "switch framework" without fully succeeding with it?

Except for that, I'm quite much against reinventing the wheel.  For
me, bwrox seems like "just another social networking site", with some
extra emphasize on geolocation.  I would be amazed if there isn't some
ready-to-use software in the open source domain that already supports
many of the bwrox features out of the box.  Alternatively, for sure
there exists many open-source applications supporting one or some of
the features we want to deliver, i.e. discussion forums, wikis,
calendar, blog, etc.  It could be possible to "stitch together" (i.e.
single signon, good cross-linkage possibilities, etc) existing
specialized applications and concentrate on the hospitality exchange
specifics in our own application?  Well, I do see drawbacks with such
solution ... but at least we would gain on it by having almost
feature-complete and bugfree subsystems on our site without too much
maintenance efforts.