[OPEN-ILS-GENERAL] Comparison to Koha?

[Mike Rylander]

On 12/23/06, Kevin Riggle <kevinr at mit.edu> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I saw the post about Evergreen ILS on Slashdot today, and I got
> curious, so I read through some of the material on your Web site.  You
> briefly mention Koha as another OSS ILS system in the FAQ, but you
> don't go into depth -- what differentiates Evergreen from Koha?

Don hit most of the high points* (though, I believe Koha was
originally developed in New Zealand).

* http://list.georgialibraries.org/pipermail/open-ils-general/2006-December/000023.html

One of the biggest differences on the functional design end is
Evergreen's focus on administrative flexibility.  TTBOMK (and Josh may
be able to give some more info here), Koha represents the
organizational structure of libraries in a flat grouping -- all
branches are peers, permissions for users (staff and patrons) are the
same across all branches, and holds/circulation rules are globally
defined.

Evergreen, on the other hand, allows the organizational hierarchy to
be defined as deep or wide as is needed, has a very fine grained,
hierarchical permission system that allows administrative staff to
define permissions for any user at any level of the hierarchy, and
circulation and holds rules can be tuned at any level using mechanisms
varying granularity and locality -- to the point of supporting
hand-scripted (not coded, mind you) tweaks if need be.  And, of
course, there are simple defaults for nearly everything.

IMO, this simply speaks to the differing origins of the systems.  Koha
is evolving from one end of the spectrum, a small library environment,
and Evergreen is evolving from the other end, a huge consortium
environment.  Both have their place, and both fill a need.

>From a technical perspective, Evergeen is, at its core, a large set of
interdependent services that define a set of external APIs.  There are
both native Jabber client/server (code) libraries and a JSON and XML
Apache client gateway module.  While not exactly bleeding edge from
the point of view of the general software development world, this is
quite a departure from how other ILSs, including Koha, have been
designed in the past.  Evergreen is (and sits atop) a platform, and is
relatively easy to extend functionally without reaching into the
depths of the existing system.

Each individual piece can be reworked or entirely replaced (which has
happened with a couple different services already, for speed purposes)
without disturbing the rest of the system, as long as the API is
retained.  By building services on top of a proven messaging core
instead of in-code APIs only, we can build a cluster of commodity
servers that fit the exact needs of a library or consortium instead of
having to purchase (and continually upgrade and replace) one enormous
server, as is generally the case with other ILSs.

>
> - Kevin
> --
> Kevin Riggle (kevinr at mit.edu)
>


-- 
Mike Rylander
mrylander at gmail.com
GPLS -- PINES Development
Database Developer
http://open-ils.org