After two long days of mostly business-side meetings about my group's focus at work, our choices to use open source tools has been validated by a landslide.
First, ANT. When asked who else in the company uses ANT, which I did not know, someone thankfully chimed in and stated that both of the other two main Java-based development groups use ANT with great success.
Second, CVS. The long-since-promoted to management senior manager present had used CVS in the past. Not only was the choice of CVS validated, but there was much relief and satisfaction that we moved from a flat-file-tar.gz archives method of backing up source, to a full-blown concurrent versioning system (CVS).
Most importantly, Tomcat. This is not simply a tool enabling our development - it is a platform that we will use to develop on, deploy to, and run our production systems on. I say systems because we use Apache-AXIS for SOAP serving, and vanilla Tomcat for our web apps.
I found out that one of the major Java groups (which has been flailing about recently) has used (drum-roll) BEA WebLogic for their failing platform. They are riddled with both organizational issues as well as development issues. In short: they move like molassas. This other group has failed to embrace the new cross-enterprise focus on SOAP for our middleware, and takes eons to deploy new and simple features.
The Sr. Management present congratulated us on our success migrating to Tomcat, and hopes that our documentation and technical leadership will be a foundation for other groups to build on.
I always thought that using open source in a large enterprise would be a struggle. Today I know, it is not.
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