[Koha] Koha and Third-Party commercial services

[Mirko]

I think Ian has a valid point here, you are definitely not paranoid.
It is a concern to me too and I like the quarantine approach Chris
has offered.

There are a lot of services integrated already and personally I wish
to keep all the snoopy data gatherers like Amazon, Google etc. out
of my library and away from my patrons. Their omnipresence in the
WWW is scary enough as it is, I don't want to assist them in any way.

I think some kind of guidelines should be set up making sure that
third party services don't get to mess with integral parts of Koha,
that no other developments get 'harmed' by new code for something
that only a certain group of people will use (this would be
prevented by Koha quality control anyway) and that those who do not
want to use a service don't have extra work (like disabling new
third party features in a new version).

C4::ExternalServices approach sounds good to me and I strongly
favour keeping extra database fields in extra tables dedicated to
the service, so Koha core does not get cluttered with extra fields
for Facebook, Google and whatnot.

Thank you for bringing up this discussion!

Mirko



schrieb Chris Nighswonger am 05.11.2011 13:15:
> Hi Ian,
> 
> 2011/11/5 Ian Walls <ian.walls at bywatersolutions.com>
> 
>>
>> Am I being crazy?  Is this a valid issue?  Are the advantages of being
>> able to talk to more external products greater than the risks of a few
>> specific company's products getting hardcoded into our ILS?
>>
> 
> 
> The point is well taken. However, I tend to think that if we were to
> isolate the unique code for external product Z to something like
> C4::ExternalServices::Z. and the database fields unique to a new table Z,
> this would sort of quarantine any "undesirable" aspects of product Z. The
> installation of the schema for table Z could be triggered by both a choice
> in the installer or the running of an separate install script (install_z)
> later by the sys-admin. The installer would simply call install_z if the
> choice was made at install time. install_z would recognize that the db was
> populated (if this were a later addition) and handle any db housework
> accordingly.
> 
> Furthering this thought of convenient abstraction, we could have
> C4::ExternalServices which would provide basic API between Koha and the
> various C4::ExternalServices::FOO modules.
> 
> Whatever way we take, quarantining/abstraction should help keep your "fear"
> from being realized.
> 
> Kind Regards,
> Chris
> 
> 
> 
> 
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