[ic] "Interchange 6"? Really?

Grant emailgrant at gmail.com
Wed Sep 28 23:31:54 UTC 2011


>> I think David feels like your throwing away *his* knowhow, and the time
>> and money he has put towards ideas and concepts in the tech he built around
>> IC.
>
> Nobody can throw away his skills. They may slowly atrophy if they are only
> useful on older technologies. We all have to keep up with change.

I've been pondering lately whether to continue forward with IC or
rewrite my store in something different.  IC works and as Jon pointed
out, "you host your own software based on open source on your own
server" so there's no reason I can't continue to do so with everything
as-is.  If I'm not satisfied with that and I want to stay on the
cutting edge, I have 3 options from what I can figure:

1. rewrite completely custom from the ground up

Compared to utilizing a framework, this provides more flexibility but
requires massively more ongoing development effort to achieve the same
result.

2. rewrite in another framework such as Magento or Spree

I'm pretty sure most if not all frameworks competing with IC claim to
provide "100%" flexibility, and yet I've read horror stories about
converting a complex online store from one to another.  The stories
weren't horrible because the process was difficult, they were horrible
because after a huge amount of effort the process turned out to be
impossible.  I've been working with IC for probably 8 years and I've
never been able to stump it.  I've never felt like what I was trying
to do "won't work in" or "isn't a good fit for" IC.  Since my store is
complex, I can't trust a platform other than IC to provide adequate
resolution.

3. wait for IC6 and rewrite

The nice thing about IC6 is it's still IC.  Because of this, I feel
like I can trust it to eventually work as well as IC which makes it
the right platform to eventually migrate to.

> Perl: Perl may not be the hippest language around right now, but it's been
> remarkably stable, is well-maintained, and has a more vibrant ecosystem in
> CPAN than ever before.

I just hope people continue to write and maintain Perl API's for their software.

> In fact, we could use help with the maintenance of Interchange 5. Very few
> people actually contribute to it, and there are lots of things to do, for
> example, improving compatibility with Perl 5.14 and UTF-8.

Perl 5.14 doesn't work well with IC?  Should the two be considered
incompatible for now?  Gentoo will surely be stabilizing perl-5.14 in
its Portage tree before too long.

> Let's just try it out as it develops, and see. Better yet: Get involved!
> Write some code! Ask Racke where you can help and I'm pretty confident he
> will tell you how you can help. You can help guide Interchange 6's direction
> if you contribute.

Has IC ever been considered for Google's Summer of Code?

http://code.google.com/soc/

- Grant



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