1. Build v. Buy Steve Kellogg Penn State University 9/24/2003

2. Kellogg's Korollaries ● We prefer to build rather than buy. – It's fun ● Build usually involves elements of Open Source – eg. libical, libperl, apache ● There's always a financial decision to be made. ● A person's ability to type is inversely proportional to the # of people watching.

3. The Pros ● Not left to the mercy/whim/stupidity of a vendor – DCE/DFS, TSM, CT, Windows ● Maximum flexibility for integration into existing infrastructure ● Maximum flexibility for feature addition or minimization ● Speed of Development – v. Open Source; Committees

4. Pros (cont'd) ● Ease/speed of problem resolution because we have the source and understand it well. ● We like to build solutions.

5. The Cons ● Nobody to call/blame ● Build is not necessarily cheaper – IBM rep;“Surely we win with economies of scale” ● Speed of implementation ● What if so-and-so left? ● Eyes-to-code ratio – Vis-e-vis open source ● Higher level skill base required

6. Examples ● Our metadirectory – Maximum Flexibility! ● Portal ● Webmail ● Co-Sign

7. Penn State Portal ● Conceptually based on uPortal ● Written in “C” ● Built fully integrated into our enterprise infrastructure – i.e. DCE,DFS,LDAP ● WebISO-ized w/ Co-Sign – Webmail

8. Portal status ● Framework written by 1 programmer in ~6 months ● Follow-on programming and maint. Performed by ½ time entry-level ● 385 Channels ● Community: ~110,000 users ● Still only on 1 4-way sparc server ● System's “bored” ● Still growing list of content providers

9. Leveraging the Infrastructure ● LDAP-enabled – Primary affiliation – Location – Semester standing – University Scholars status ● Channel and tab level authorization ● Apache w/ mod_auth_DCE – Auth/auth via cached creds

10. Leveraging the Infrastructure ● Personalization store in DFS ● University events calendar – Webevent – Import of event catagories into personal calendars.

11. Content ● Portal Publishing – Web forms enable publisher to create channels and Portal team to “check in” channels – RSS Web form allows a publisher to create RSS output w/o knowledge of RSS or XML – RSS parser (C, lex, yacc)

12. Content (cont'd) ● Scraping content – Over 300 “official” web servers – Some content “pulled” by Portal and formatted into a channel. – Some channels run on other servers using the application engine of their choice, e.g. WebObjects, Cold Fusion, ASP.

13. Standards ● RSS – Rich Site Summary ● Kerberos v5 ● LDAP v3 ● Calendaring via iCal – RFC 2445

14. Tools ● Sun Workshop C – common modules used in Portal and Webmail ● perl,sed,awk,Bourne shell, perlDBI ● Yacc, lex ● DB2 and DB2 APIs ● IBM's LDAP server ● RCS for revision control