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Exchanging Exchange

Posted on 20 Dec 2005 at 15:29

Simon Brock and Ian Wrigley try to find a drop-in open-source replacement for Exchange Server

Opendocument

There's been a lot of fuss recently about OpenDocument and the fact that the Massachusetts State government in the US has decided to standardise on that format for all of its public records. So what is OpenDocument, and why is it important?

OpenDocument is basically a file format for saving editable documents such as spreadsheets, presentations and text-based documents (memos, letters and so on). The standard was created by the OASIS consortium of industry organisations, whose members include Sun and SAP. The idea is to provide an open alternative to proprietary document storage formats such as those used by Microsoft for its Word, Excel and PowerPoint applications. Microsoft has said that future versions of its Office suite will save documents in Microsoft Office Open XML, which it's made openly available, but some people are still critical of Open XML as Microsoft has patents attached to the format and its licensing terms aren't completely compatible with other open-source licences.

The fact that Massachusetts is mandating that all future documents be available in this format prompted Microsoft, whose applications don't support it, to criticise OpenDocument and the Massachusetts decision, especially since, unless future versions of Office support OpenDocument, Microsoft's Office suite won't be usable by any State government departments.

Meanwhile, in Europe, the OpenDocument format has been submitted to the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). If ISO approves OpenDocument as a standard, it's quite possible the European Union will require OpenDocument as the format for all EU documentation. At that point, Microsoft - which for much of 2005 said that it wouldn't support OpenDocument, claiming it lacks some important functionality (although precisely what particular functions that might be isn't specified) - will be virtually forced into supporting the standard. Indeed, there are now rumours that Microsoft is already working with a company to provide an Office plug-in to support OpenDocument, although it hasn't said so officially.

Ruby on rails

Recently, we've been experimenting with Ruby on Rails, a relatively new web-development framework based on the Ruby programming language. Ruby has been around for quite some time - it was developed by a Japanese student back in the early 1990s and has attracted a cult following ever since. However, Ruby on Rails has dramatically increased the language's popularity, as the framework makes it remarkably easy for developers to create the basics of a web application with almost no work.

Indeed, this 'feature' almost put us off Ruby on Rails immediately, as we'd read so many stories to the effect that you can 'create a web application in less than ten minutes without a single line of code' that we dismissed it all as complete hype. On further examination, though, Ruby, when coupled with Ruby on Rails, certainly does bear checking out if you're a web developer.

Ruby is a completely object-oriented language in which even something as simple as a number is considered an object. That, especially for programmers whose main experience is in a language like PHP or Perl, will take a bit of getting used to. In some respects, Ruby bears more resemblance to Lisp than it does to PHP, but once you've become used to the basic language it's actually fairly elegant and lends itself to some pretty neat programming constructs.

Ruby on Rails is a framework that's designed to take much of the work out of basic web-application development tasks. For example, one key part of Rails is that it automatically generates CRUD (that's Create, Read, Update and Delete records) pages for a particular database table. In other words, you can create a database table (or tables) and have Rails automatically build pages that will allow a user to add, modify and delete records in those tables. Data validation is simple and relationships between tables are easy to add.