Imaging News — April 2006
| Feature Article: | Making the Java Community Work For You – The Value of Open-Source Code and Commercial Products |
| Announcements | Snowbound Announces Strong Q1 Results (Read the Release) |
| Product Spotlight: | RasterMaster for Java Imaging SDK |
| Events | AIIM, May 16-18, Phiadelphia, PA |
| President's Corner: | The Next Big Thing: Software Version Upgrades |
| Tech Tip: | Java Samples to Convert PDF to TIFF |
Making the Java Community Work For You – The Value of Open-Source Code and Commercial Products
The Java language has created a large, devoted community since its release by Sun Microsystems in the mid-1990s. The flexibility offered by its object-oriented approach and cross-platform compatibility has been a major draw for software developers.
The community also actively works to move Java forward through constant innovation — including major open-source projects like the plug-in based application framework Eclipse Platform — that allows Java to compete with native platforms — such as Windows. However, on a small scale, individual developers that freely distribute their solutions to specific problems can create unnecessary noise that makes searching for credible open-source or commercial solutions more time-consuming.
As Alex Harm, a Snowbound Software engineer and Java developer of nine years states, “Free tools can often point you in the right direction, or offer a partial solution to your task. However, if you need help or additional functionality, you may or may not be able to find the answer on an internet forum. A commercial solution is often the most complete, and offers professional support.”
Most corporate projects take advantage of both open-source code (either using it under an open license or as a research tool) and commercial products to increase productivity and reduce development time. Clearly defining what you will need from third-party code before beginning your search will help you determine which will fit your needs. Some major considerations are:
- Scalability of tools to meet current and future development requirements
- Areas of development difficulty that could be simplified by third-party libraries
- Need to support backwards compatibility in your application
Once your project requirements are clear, knowing the strengths and limitations of open-source code and commercial products will enable you to make the best decision for your project.
Read more about the strengths and limitations you should consider when evaluating different options.
Product Spotlight
RasterMaster for Java is the premier, commercial Java imaging SDK and library in the industry. RasterMaster empowers you to develop an application or solution featuring expert imaging capabilities.
Request an evaluation of a RasterMaster for Java Imaging SDK.
President's Corner
Have you ever wondered whether your vendor and you share the same feelings about version upgrades? I suspect that in most cases, they don’t.
For many application users, upgrades are welcomed due to a host of exciting new features. If you’re our kind of customer, typically creating industrial applications, upgrades of our imaging libraries are often regarded as a necessary evil. Presumably the current version of our library is doing its job, so why change it - particularly if you have a 2-4 month QA process. Yet you know that if you delay upgrading, at some point operating system changes, Java environment development, or new types of images and documents will cause your product to fail.
Snowbound certainly recognizes these facts of life for B2B application developers. What do we do about it?
Well, we feel it is important to enhance our products to provide you with increasing value by adding new features as determined by our reading of the industry and through customer requests. New annual releases (as well as our monthly Library releases) prove to you that we’re alive and the product is alive, and that your maintenance dollars are well spent. And somewhat selfishly, continuous development makes it harder for competitors to either catch us or to even enter the market.
So should you upgrade at all?
Absolutely! The industry is continually changing and obsoleting old products. Your product will eventually fail if you don’t upgrade its underlying technology. And though you can contract for old versions to be supported, none of us like it. You start getting orphaned products that don’t receive the latest enhancements. We do it if we have to, but it costs us and you, much more.
What Do We Recommend?
Everyone’s busy and you all have demanding release and QA schedules. So we don’t expect you to upgrade on our schedule but you should establish your own upgrade schedule. And it should be based on your vendor’s release cycle. We release upgrades once per year so we urge you to not delay by more than six months. This gives you time to explore the latest improvements and also be in a position to get any special fixes you might need from us without going to extra expense.
Simon Wieczner, CEO