If you could do it all over again…
Having done battle with the koha code base for a few months, there have been too many times when something conceptually simple has been surprisingly difficult to express in code.
With KohaCon coming up soon, I thought I’d throw out this hypothetical question to get your creative juices flowing.
If you could do it all over again, how would you go about creating a Free library automation system from scratch?
This question is purely hypothetical, so take it with a grain of salt. However, I ask this big question, because I think it’s interesting from an architect’s perspective.
Starting with the data model, how would your ideal differ from koha’s current database schema? What would you keep the same, and what would you change? Would you even use a relational database, or would you be adventurous and experiment with a schemaless databases like CouchDB?
What about configurability? I feel it is simultaneously koha’s greatest strength and its greatest weakness. It has allowed koha to accomodate a wide variety of libraries, but it has come at the cost of greatly increased code complexity. Is there anything that your ideal system could do to minimize this complexity?
Anyway, this is just something fun to ponder.