When you set out to develop a new application, reagardless of langauge, how often do you sit down and just start writing code from scratch?

How often do you first look to see if there is already an open source, or freeware solution that you can customize to fit your needs?

Where do you look?

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Chris Webb,
Executive Editor

I almost always start from scratch, sometimes even when I do find a pre-made solution (unless I'm in a hurry). You usually know an application you make far better than one you download :)

Snib

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In the previous company I used to work for, we always tried to look for ready-made software. However, often we had as a requirement that the project was really open source, so we could reuse important parts and components, without using the entire application as is.

As a "system integrator", we were responsible for delivering large scaled applications that would fit in with the organisation's infrastructure and existing software and platforms. Often, open source or free-ware applications (or, in fact, any type of application) have their own structure, their own database, their own (proprietary) data format etc etc preventing us from integrating the application seamlessly.

So, we did use a lot of readily available source and software, but we always tried to incorporate and adapt it to our software, instead of offering it as a complete solution. We "borrowed" a lot of source for Web / Server controls, forums, CMS systems, menus, etc, but we always changed it so it would fit in with *our* existing programming guidelines, design decisions and customer's requirements.


Imar
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Imar Spaanjaars
Everyone is unique, except for me.
While typing this post, I was listening to: Battlestar Scralatchtica by Incubus (Track 10 from the album: Make Yourself) What's This?

When developing Access applications, I always start from scratch as all of my databases are unique in what information they store as well as how they store it. However, there are some things that I use from other sources. Take for example the mvps.org website. The Access website that can be found there contains code that I have found to be very useful. A while ago, I found a bit of VBA code on this site in the Access VBA forum that was from Bob Bedell. It was code for a splash-screen form. Now, I needed a splash-screen form for my Music Inventory 2001 database and I got what I needed here. A lot of the things I find relating to VBA code samples are customized to fit my own needs.

  When looking for an already implemented solution, I don't just look on the internet. There are Access databases on my local computer that have what I can re-use. What I do to bring them into my database that I'm working on is this: I just do a copy in the source database, open the destination database and paste it in there. That way, I'm saving myself a lot of headaches.

Ben Horne
Madison Area Technical College - Truax
3550 Anderson Street
Madison, Wisconsin 53704-2599


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http://community.webshots.com/user/valerian114

"There are two kinds of people in the world: Those who claim to be Flash junkies and those who actually are Flash junkies"

Early on I liked developing completely from scratch. As I've gained some experience I've realized how much of a hassle it is to reinvent applications that already exist elsewhere. At this point I find myself in a healthy balance of both. For instance in a project I did a few months ago I needed a calendar application. I found a suitable calendar appication available open source and used that as the foundation for my project, which eliminated a great deal of guess work and logic tinkering and sped the project along quite well I did in a few days what could have easily taken two weeks starting from scratch.

Often times however, many open source projects are sparsely documented or too customized to one particular usage, which makes them difficult for even a programmer of intermediate skill to adapt to their own needs and completly inaccessible to the beginner.

On the other hand though, there are many that are accessible and tried and true solutions to complex problems that to build from scratch would require months upon months of programming and testing. Building from scratch privately or proprietarily takes away some of the real world element where thousands of people are using, testing and improving the application in question.

These days I always do some searching for an existing solution before building from scratch. And I have one of my own in PHP PEAR at http://pear.php.net. It's a program that can be used as a webmail backend called Mail_IMAP. I started Mail_IMAP as a personal project, I wanted to build a webmail program from scratch. The project took somewhere between 6-8 months before I had a good enough understanding of how PHP's built in webmail functions work. I used some poorly written tutorials and some very sparse documentation on PHP imap_* functions to put together my program. At some point I wanted to go open source with the project. Since I put together and released the package on PEAR I have discovered a number of bugs and errors that I would have either never found or taken years to discover without the widespread testing. So going open source with the project has had huge advantages. I also have the luxury of being able to invite others to assist on the project whereas it can be improved even more. And yet, in this particular program, a ready to implement PHP webmail program using the imap function library, already abstracted and fully customizable didn't already exist somewhere else. The closest were squirrelmail and horde, which are very difficult to abstract to one's particular aesthetic needs. So building from scratch here filled a need in the market.

Regards,
Rich

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The Spicy Peanut Project
http://www.spicypeanut.net
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Start from the scratch considering the upgrades & enhancement over the existing will always give you the real satisfaction when the application also put forward with the usage of latest Technology.

Regards,
Gokul

Usually 80%-plus scratch.
The time taken to slog your way through the mountains of available samples is more than the time to develop it yourself—especially when you consider the drudgery factor.

When I have a piece I’ve written that works particularly well, and that I really like, I will wrap it up into a library to be reused though.

The only problem I have with getting code over writing it is that it usually is too vague or it has components that are useless (to me). Also it is hard to develop code from poorly written documentation.

I work as a sysadmin and dabble in web development stuff, so most of the code I write is relatively trivial, and I frequently end up writing from scratch. However, if there is a free software/open source library available to do some of the work I am more than happy not to reinvent the wheel.

Generally I find the FLOSS stuff out there is of such high quality and so tweakable that I couldn't justify trying to write my own version!

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Don't Stand on your head - you'll get footprints in your hair
                                           http://charlieharvey.org.uk
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