[Koha] Koha and Third-Party commercial services

[Chris Nighswonger]

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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