Saturday, July 9th, 2005, 4:42 am
The Export Dilemma
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here comes a time in the lifecycle of an application when reliable and non-lossy export facilities need to be implemented. Unfortunately, ego of developers sometimes leads to good import facilities while there is only limited or no support for export of user data. Del.icio.us are one example which was previously mentioned. Another such example is Microsoft Outlook et al. Microsoft are reluctant to allow easy data export, which implies no trivial escape from proprietary. Thunderbird, however, does a terrific job importing all data (mail and settings) from Outlook or Outlook Express. OpenOffice.org acts upon Microsoft Office proprietary reasonably well too.
WordPress are currently working on export facilities that simplify and bridge the gap between the administration panel (application) and the data (SQL). It is wonderful to see export facilities realised, which demonstrates no ego among the software developers. This allows users to ‘dance’ between platforms at will. There is always a certain feeling of freedom knowing that taking on one certain application cannot result in a vendor lock-in.
