choosing components (Score 0)

in your response, you indicated that 3rd party components were chosen purely based on their market position. i'm not sure who you were working with, but as a consultant, i've never seen a competent CTO/CIO make a decision based on market position. what they have done, on the other hand, is pick the right tool for the job - namely, evaluated the quality of the software, the features, the technical support *and*, most importantly, its support for the platform they were going to run it on. in my experience, in the real world, a component requiring such hoops (installing unsupported versions of software, upgrading glibc etc) to be jumped through would never even make it to the evaluation stage. with all of that said, it is highly debatable that the 'no custom code' approach is even worth looking at - it does not reflect real life. and this is coming from someone who's worked with some of the top 100 ecommerce sites in several european countries and the US.