That Was the Week That Was
 Last week the Web
development community was buzzing about two things:
Meanwhile, on Wednesday I went over to Internet World at Javits
Center to hear a presentation sponsored by the Open Source SIG of
the World Wide Web Artists
Consortium (WWWAC). Tom Clarke of Union Square Internet Development
presented a migration case study involving a client of his, Sesame
Workshop, creators of the PBS children's show Sesame Street and a family
of impressive and related Web sites, including sesamestreet.com. Clarke helped
Sesame Workshop move all its Web applications from a proprietary backend
based on Vignette Story Server and Oracle to a wholly open-source
backend based on PHP and MySQL.
The Sesame Workshop IT manager was in attendance and offered these
interesting factoids:
His Vignette license cost "in the six figures"
annually. Vignette is a "very screwed up
company" that didn't work very hard to keep Sesame Workshop's
business.
Sesame Workshop dumped its Sun servers (along with their associated maintenance contracts) and moved to commodity (i.e., Intel) hardware.
The manager said he had no hard projections to
share, but hinted broadly that he anticipated saving hundreds of
thousands of dollars, over what period of time he didn't say.
6:40:03 PM 
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