I have been planning to build a Dentist Application for the use of the Dentist to add patients(with medical profiles...), organize visits, manage balance/fees....etc
I know Java, .NET( C#) (some windows forms), and Python. Do you have any suggestions with the language I should maybe start with and the framework and IDE that will make my life easier (and help me finish in a good amount of time). This program will be connected with a database of at least 1000 patients...
IDE's I am familiar with : eclipse, Netbeans, and Visual Studio.
I want suggestions with reason explanations (why would you favor C# over Java ....compatibility....etc)
Thanks,
It's not the database side, or even the programming environment, that will be the issue for a dental practice.
I consult for a dentist friend of mine, and the opportunity arose to sell him a fully-functional contact/document management application to run his patient database.
In the end, I couldn't in good conscience recommend my own application, because not being designed for the dental sector, it lacks the specialised interfaces with dental imaging systems.
Databases, appointments, invoices, etc, are easy.
But what a dentist needs is something that integrates with the dental records themselves - the X-ray images of teeth. It needs a simple UI, easily usable by the dental nurse while she works with the dentist while he has his hands in the patient's mouth.
We could have written a suitable graphical interface to an image library (imagine a diagrammatic representation of the teeth in their relative positions in the mouth, linked to the images themselves), but it wasn't worth it - especially as there are several highly specialised dental packages around already.
I suggest to start with some research on the subject (the dentist domain) and to make a decent functional design before you start to think about IDE's and languages.
And then try to figure out some other things:
For instance, will you make a SAAS or a windows client, do all your customers have internet access. Iis the sensitive patient data allowed to be stored on the web.
I believe that question is very relative to the person programming. I think as the developer you have to figure out where you would be most successful at or what you want to get out of the project. If you are using this project to make money then do what you are comfortable with. If you are using it to better yourself as a developer then pick a language you are less confident in.
The one thing I want to add, is remember PHI (Protected Health Information). So, you have to have patient privacy in mind when building an app like this.
If it were me... I would write something in .NET and use Visual Studio which works very well for windows forms. Windows forms would work very well in an office environment.
Just my 2 cents.
First introduce yourself to the business knowledge. Healthcare programs aren't written overnight and you have to take into account that you need to have a very secure application and probably also need to keep years of information (the program I was involved in in 2001-2002 had to keep 30 years of patient history due to Belgian law).
Choosing the technology is actually entirely up to you: what are you good at? Can you find already prebuild pieces of code or controls ...
You can write such an application in any of the languages you have mentioned.
Research the features you will need and the support you can expect from each language and the different available libraries.
You need to come up with a good design first (regardless of language/platform), and make sure you have all the requirements - how many people should be supported in the system, how many concurrent users, privacy of data, security features, access patterns etc...
You should probably use the language you are most comfortable with, in particular if the features you require have similar support in the different languages/frameworks.
Related
I used to be a programmer and unix sysadmin back in the 90's and early 00's. I wrote business software mostly in BBX, which was non-compiled, procedural BASIC. It was all text based when I started, and I only just got into GUI and OOP with ProvideX by the time I got out. I did do some SQL work and understand basic database concepts.
I've continually dabbled since and tried to keep up by running my own Debian web server here at the house, doing little script programs here and there, and most recently learning PHP and Python. But I would like to get versed in the current state of the industry and hopefully make myself employable in it again.
My current learning project is to write a db app that I can use when drag racing to log run data, report based on various combinations of variables, and predict vehicle performance. This should cover IO, data management, and some complex math. I do want to make is sellable, so it has to be in Windows since all other racing software is. My two options now are to write it in MSAccess, which isn't really programming, or to write a front end in Python and use MySQL for the data.
I assume I should go the Python path out of those two, or should I choose a third path that would pay more dividends toward a job? My biggest concern is wasting my time learning pointless stuff. I assume most of the work out there is db related and web based applications, so that would be my ultimate goal. Correct me if I am wrong on that.
Thanks for any input,
Dave
If your goal is to get back into software development, then I recommend that you first ask yourself what type of industry and development setting you'd like to work in. Learn something about the skills those industries are demanding... Then hit Monster and peruse the job qualifications for companies in those industries. Don't limit your view to just language names and broad job descriptions either, but really try to get an idea what sort of developer they're looking for and whether you'd fit in well.
You will be able to find many interesting technologies in lots of different business domains, but what do you really want to be working to help deliver? Python coding, for example, may be interesting, but I'm sure you'd be more interested if it were supporting your motorsport interest in some way versus, say, baby food. When you have the business domains narrowed down, then you can focus on the background required to get jobs in those industries.
You will find an endless set of recommended "hot" techologies if you search for them. I'm sure you can find a list, or post, which will confirm any bias you have on what to learn. But chasing the technology of the day may lead to an unfulfilling day-to-day job if what you're applying it to is not something you find interesting.
I would say that the answer depends on what type of job you want to do. The Fortune 500 company I worked at last summer had everything from mainframe c and cobol, java EE, .net to ruby on rails and python in applications. There are still alot of jobs maintaining legacy desktop applications. But the web atmosphere is obviously the future of business computing, and java EE and .NET are huge players in that arena. As for the project you are describing. I've done QT applications with python and there are python libraries for GTK that I've seen used to run apps in Windows. I've also used java swing and awt to build graphical applications and other than the learning curve for the layout system it works really well for building applications. I wrote a really basic windows application using visual studio and C# one time and that seemed to me to be very easy to write.
Enterprise level Java or .NET involve a fairly steep learning curve, so I would have those as a medium-long term goal rather than try and learn that tech immediately.
It seems to me that learning a high productivity web framework is the best way for you to go. "Ruby on Rails" seems to be a hot ticket at the moment. I've only had a small look at it, but it seems pretty quick and straightforward. Your drag racing app would be a good place to start.
Build a couple of websites for yourself using the tech. Then build a couple of websites for friends for a nominal fee. After that, see if you can find a real client (perhaps a local business). If you have 2 or 3 of those under your belt, then a potential employer will at least take notice.
One warning, though - people expect web sites to look nice. If you don't have good interface design skills yourself, it will be in your best interest to hire a designer to pretty up whatever you produce.
For a Windows desktop application, you can use C# and the various .NET APIs, and store your data in either a Microsoft-provided database, or SQLite, which is a reliable, server-free SQL implementation. (I don't know anything about Microsoft tech, hence the vagueness of my answer.) There is a lot of work available using C# and .NET, and it should be easy to pick up. You'll meet less resistance on the Windows platform with Microsoft's kit than with third-party languages like Python.
Is there a way of offering the flexibility of Excel/Access development that end users love while instilling centralised IT management so data and logic is secure, backed up, version controlled etc. The common options are to re-write in C#/ASP.Net/Java/Python/Your Choice, but that takes away control from the users. Is there a better way, and what do you do at your site?
There is a universal issue of users creating fantastically useful Excel/Access mini-apps that the IT department would like to bring under control. Users love the flexibility that Excel affords, especially on the fly changes, graphing and data import/export. In Access we have brilliant QBE. The downside is that after a short while there are legions of out of control spreadsheets/mdbs which are mission critical, with lots poorly understood business logic, and brittle code, they're a pain to support especially as staff move on.
This puts the IT dept in an awkward spot, they'd like to support these apps, but don't know enough about them. This is made more difficult as they are typically insecure with zero documentation.
Having been of both sides of the fence I would go after the root cause of the problem. Why do uses make their own little apps? Because it is too hard/expensive/time consuming/never turns out right when they go through the “proper” channels.
The other thing is they tend to know the business very well so whilst their coding might not be very good their knowledge of what needs doing is very good.
So what can we do to combat this problem? I personally think their should be a small team of people within IT whose job (or one of their jobs) is to develop these small applications. They should work very closely with the end users and not be locked in the ivory tower of IT.
In my current role I’m on the non-IT side of the fence, I have a few quite major applications that needed to be developed so I asked for an install of visual studio and some space on an SQL server. I had my request denied. So I just asked for SQL server space, again request denied (each request taking about a week to go through) So in the end I’m “stuck” in access.
Now these are very nice access apps with version control, comments in the (shock!) and all the other nice things but at the end of the day I was trying to do things the “right” way and ended up being forced down the access route. So when my apps try to get scaled up and I’m quoting a long time for a rewrite who is to blame?
Have you considered looking at SharePoint for department-level applications? Many professional developers will balk at the idea of using Sharepoint for "application development," but it truthfully can be a great way for "power users" to start putting their data and tools in a managed framework.
With SharePoint, you can manage the overall structure of the site and then set up users with elevated permissions within their respective departments. There are some great 3rd-party tools to help with keeping an eye on what's going on in your SharePoint site.
SharePoint is not a silver bullet by any means, but it is great for many multi-user applicatinos that need to keep up with a list of data.
(The following is not really related to my above answer, but your question really hit home and I thought I'd share my similar experiences and insights.)
Our company will be going through a similar process in the near future. I'm on the "end user" side of things and can sympathize with a lot of what Kevin Ross said. Sometimes Access and Excel are simply the best tools available for me to get the job done.
Here's an example: I was asked several years ago to come up with a system for creating Purchase Orders to a vendor in China for product for which there is a 3 month lead time. Our ERP software had a few features for procurement, but nothing that even came close to the complexity of the situation we were facing. Years later, after going through several iterations of the application in Excel (VLOOKUP was a lifesaver), Access ("So that is why people using relational databases. Awesome!), and back in Excel ("let's not make this so complicated"), I still find that these Micorosft Office apps are the best tools to get the job done.
What's the cost to not use these tools to get the job done?
Contract work to our ERP vendor to add a special feature for this ordering process: are you kidding me? We'd likely pay tens of thousands of dollars for an unflexible monolithic application with horrendous user experience...and we would still end up back in Excel.
Buy third party software designed for this exact process: I've seen an on-site demo of software that does exactly what I want for our procurement process. It starts at $100,000. There are probably other tools that we can get for a few thousand dollars, but at that price point, I've already emulated most of their features in my own application.
Try to finish the job "by hand." : Ha! I'm a programmer at heart, which means I'm lazy. If it takes a solid week of sitting at a desk to work up a purchase order (it actually did take this long), you can bet I'm going to work up a solution so that it only takes me a few hours (and now it does). Perhaps the guy after me will go back to doing most of it by hand, but I'll use the tools in my toolbox to save myself time and stress.
It's so hard to find the perfect application to allow for maximum creativity on the user end but still allow IT to "manage" it. Once you think you've found a solution for one thing, you realize it doesn't do something else. Can I write I printable report in this solution like I used to do in Access? Can I write complicated Excel formulas that tie multiple data sources together from different sheets ("You want me to learn what? No, I've never heard of a "SQuirreL query" before. VLOOKUP is just fine thankyouvermuch)? Can I e-mail the results to the people in my department? Can it automatically pull data from our back-end database like I do in Excel and Access? Can I write my own code, VBA or otherwise, to make my job easier? The list goes on.
In the end, the best advice I can give to any IT manager in your situation is to respect the other workers at your company. Let them know their work is important (even if it's only useful to them and the guy at the next desk over). Let them know you are not trying to make their job harder. Don't assume they are morons for creating mission-critical applications in office productivity software; they are just trying to get the job done with the tools at hand and are usually quite capable and intelligent people. Invite them to explore different solutions with you instead of just removing the tools they currently have in their toolbox and then replacing them with ones they don't know how to use.
At the end of the day, if you have users who are smart enough to shoot themselves in the foot by creating complicated apps in Excel and Access, they are probably smart enough to learn to use the appropriate tools to accomplish the same tasks. Invest the time and energy to involve them in the process and you will have a solution that works for everyone at the end.
You could try a hybrid approach: Allow your users to use Excel/Access to home-brew their own, specialized tools, but take the mission-critical stuff and put it under IT control. There are a few strategies that could help you with this:
Make sure that your IT department is firm on VBA. Not the "yeah-everybody-can-write-a-few-lines-of-basic" type of knowledge, but in-depth training, just like you would if it were a less simple programming language. Although "real programmers" will tell you otherwise, it is possible to write large, stable applications in VBA.
If you currently have the data in Access databases, move away from that and migrate it to an SQL Server. This allows you to do centralized backup and management, while still giving your power users the flexibility to "link" these SQL Server tables to their Access frontend.
Commonly used business logic should be under control of your IT department. This can be done either with VBA, by creating an Access library that is linked by your users, or in any of the .net languages, using COM interop. The latter sounds more complicated than it is, and it will increase the satisfaction of your IT department, since developing in .net is just much more rewarding than VBA (version control possible, etc.).
I would second one of Kevin Ross's main points:
I personally think their should be a
small team of people within IT whose
job (or one of their jobs) is to
develop these small applications. They
should work very closely with the end
users and not be locked in the ivory
tower of IT.
I think any IT department that has a lot of users using Access/Excel should have at least one properly trained and experienced specialist in developing apps on those platforms. That person would be the go-between to make sure that:
IT's priorities and policies get properly implemented in the home-grown apps.
the end users get expert help in converting their home-grown efforts into something more stable and well-designed.
I would second Tony's point that whoever works with the end users in revising these apps to meet IT standards should work side-by-side with the users. The Access/Excel specialist should be an advocate for the end users, but also for the IT policies that have to be followed.
I also think that an IT department could have a specialist or two on staff, but should also have a full-time professional Access and/or Excel developer as a consultant, since the on-staff people could probably handle day-to-day issues and management of the apps, while the professional consultant could be called in for planning and architecture and for the implementation of more complex feature sets.
But all of that would depend on the size of the organization and the number of apps involved. I don't know that it would be desirable to have someone on salary who is nothing but an Access/Excel specialist, precisely because of the problem you get with all salaried employees compared to consultants -- the employees don't see as wide a variety of situations as an active consultant with the same specialization is likely to see and thus the consultant is going to have broader experience.
Of course, I recognize that many companies do not like to outsource anything, or not something that important. I think that's unwise, but then again, I'm the person that gets hired by the people who decide to do it!
If it's mission critical, and it's in Access or Excel, is built poorly, and no one understands it, it is probably time to rebuild it properly.
When the 'users' are in control it usual means one particular person is in control of the architecture, design, coding and documentation... except they normally omit the documentation step. Source control and bug reporting, the touchstone of software development, is usually absent. Few instances of code reuse, due to the nature of Office apps (code modules usually embedded into documents) and VBA (little OOP, most VBA coders don't use Implements, etc). All this means that the resulting applications are not subject to get proper scrutiny and quality can suffer, meaning there are likely to be maintenace issues, escpecially when that one user leaves. I know because I used to be that person ;)
So in order to satisfy the IT department, the proper process needs to be applied. That one 'power' user can continue to own the design and coding but will get peer review, perhaps the serivces of a technical author and a dedicated tester, be required to use source control, perhaps consider integrating with enterprise systems, etc.
There is no getting around the use of Excel/Access. It's what's available, and still very powerful and flexible. The best thing to do is offer some guidelines as to how files should look and be set up. If everyone is using similar standards then the files will live longer and more productive lives, beyond the creator's tenure at the company.
You've got some excellent answers regarding dealing with the folks and the business side of things. So my response will be more technical.
If you are going to redesign the app have the developers work in the same offices as the users. Given the users updates every day or two. If the users have any minor suggestions give those to the users within a day or two. Ultra Frequent Application Deployment
Give the power users an Access MDB/ACCDB linked to the tables with a bunch of starter queries. Let them create the queries they need to export the data to Excel for their own purposes and distribution to clients.
Let me introduce myself a bit.
I have 7 years of C++ (most MFC) experience, 1 year C#.NET and 2 years Java experience.
I know little about web application, what I did and am doing is Windows desktop applications.
I start to do some (minor) (freelance) side projects in the past half year and uses C# mostly as it's more "rapid" than MFC. But seems there's more web projects in this market than desktop projects. And I do not feel good as long as I do not know web development.
So, should I touch the new web filed for me or just stay focus in desktop application but learn more e.g Python, or Frameworks/Libraries such as Qt or Boost?
My gut feeling is that more and more people/companies are moving their projects to the web. My company, for example, has added numerous web applications since I have been there. Another prime example of this is Microsoft (yes, even them) providing a web-based version of Office, their flagship product.
There will always be a need for desktop applications, but I see more web-based projects in the future. It's always good to learn something new, anyway.
EDIT: Oh, and you don't lose anything by being aware of "desktop-based" processes. You may be doing more server-side programming, even if it is web-based. So, in other words, it doesn't hurt to continue expanding your knowledge in that arena, as well.
There will most likely still be a market for desktop applications for many years to come. However, web development seems to have taken over a large share of the development market from what I can see. I would recommend definitely getting familiar with web development as it definitely can't hurt to increase the number of skills you have even if you never stop writing desktop apps.
Since you have experience with C# you might want to consider doing some ASP.NET work. Or if you feel the need to learn a new technology then maybe consider a framework like Ruby on Rails.
I'd really suggest looking into web development - like you said, there are many more web application projects - and you already know C#.NET and Java, and both of those languages have really good API's / frameworks for web development. ASP.NET for C# and Java Servlets/JSPs.
I'd first suggest learning some really basic HTML to learn how pages are rendered, then try to make dynamic versions using the language of your choice. Then I'd learn some other web technologies like CSS/Javascript/some Javascript libraries - then I'd start looking at frameworks that build on top of the basics in the language of your choice.
Oh, and some further suggestions - there are web frameworks that are component-based rather than request-based - you may be tempted to learn these as a shortcut to web development since most claim that developing in them is similar to desktop development. I really wouldn't suggest this - as in practice you really do need to know how the web works at a lower level to develop custom components, include things that the framework doesn't do, or to debug them when things go wrong even when using these frameworks. If you jump right in you can get lost/confused pretty quickly.
Microsoft Office 2010 will have an online version. To me this is a watershed moment for Web applications. Office apps are an important litmus test as once you can do Office on the Web (which has been the case with Google Documents for some time but Office has important symbolic meaning) you can do most things that most users care about.
Desktop apps won't die but I definitely think they're going to take more and more of a backseat.
I'd highly suggest you read How Microsoft Lost the API War if you haven't already. One of the things that's particularly amazing about this post is that it was written in 2004.
I honestly believe that with maybe the exception of OSs and browsers, everything will be a web app within the next 10 years. Having said that, let me clarify that by everything I mean everything that a) involves a UI of some kind and b) can be guaranteed secure.
User-interfaced apps will always at some point need a backend, which will at some level require code that is not being interfaced by humans and not being executed via HTTP. I am always reminding myself that things like 'cat' in Unix are actually programs that the OS is calling, not just a function built into the OS. MySQL won't be a web app (as far as I know), but app that powers web apps. We may get to a point where these apps are fully developed via a web interface, written, audited, uploaded and called all via a browser, but at some level its still running behind the scenes.
On that second point, about guaranteed security, I can very easily imagine a large corporation or government office running 95 percent of their daily routines via web apps, but mandating that certain high-security operations be done on a machine directly interfaced with some sort of mainframe, after passing through the cool doors with the retinal scans and what not. Or simply because they can't risk moving certain mission-critical apps over to the web, from fear of it breaking our losing data in the process.
But with those two things aside, I honestly believe everything will be web-based. With the advancement of Web Services and XML in general, it will be possible to not only access and interact with our data, but to plug our custom apps into another app and extend that interaction further and in any environment we want.
It's like that Apple ad "There's an app for that." Except once people get the real picture, it won't be an app written for your iPhone, but a URL. "There's a site for that."
I recommend learning the Lift framework. It's as easy to use as Rails, and it's based on a statically-typed language for the JVM, Scala. From the perspective of your background, Scala should be middling to easy to learn, and you'll be more likely to be comfortable with it than with a dynamic language.
In my opinion, you have a good chance of picking it up quickly, learn a lot about good practices in web development, and even expanding your programming horizons a bit.
In my organisation, we have some very inefficient processes around managing requirements, tracking what was actually delivered on what versions, etc, do subsequent releases break previous functionality, etc - its currently all managed manually. The requirements are spread over several documents and issue trackers, and the implementation details is in code in subversion, Jira, TestLink. I'm trying to put together a system that consolidates the requirements info, so that it is sourced from a single, authoritative source, is accessible via standard interfaces - web services, browsers, etc, and can be automatically validated against. The actual domain knowledge is not that complicated but is highly proprietary and non-standard (i.e., not just customers with addresses, emails, etc), and is relational: customers have certain functionalities, features switched on/off, specific datasources hooked up - all on specific versions. So modelling this should be straightforward.
Can anyone advise the best approach for this - I a certain that I can develop a system from scratch that matches exactly the requirements, in say ruby on rails, grails, or some RAD framework. But I'm having difficulty getting management buy-in, they would feel safer with an off the shelf solution.
Can anyone recommend such a system? Or am I better off building it from scratch, as I feel I am? I'm afraid a bought system would take just as long to deploy, and would not meet our requirements.
Thanks for any advice.
I believe that you are describing two different problems. The first is getting everyone to standardize and the second is selecting a good tool for requirements management. I wouldn't worry so much about the tool as I would the process and the people. Having the best tool in the world won't help if your various project managers don't want to share.
So, my suggestion is to start simple. Grab Redmine or Trac and take on the challenge of getting everyone to standardize. Once you have everyone in the right mindset then you can improve the tools you use for storage.
{disclaimer - mentioning my employer's product}
The brief experiments I made with a commercial tool RequisitePro seemed pretty good me. Allowed one to annotate existing Word docs and create a real-time linked database of the identified requisistes then perform lots of analysis and tracking of them.
Sometimes when I see a commercial product I think "Oh, well nice glossy bits but the fundamentals I could knock up in Perl in a weekend." That's not the case with this stuff. I would certainly look at commercial products in this space and exeperiment with a couple (ReqPro has a free trial, I guess the competition will too) before spending time on my own development.
Thanks a mill for the reply. I will take a look at RequisitePro, at least I'll be following the "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" strategy ;) youre right, and I kinda knew it, in these situations, buy is better. It is tempting when I can visualise throwing it together quickly, but theres other tradeoffs and risks with that approach.
Thanks,
Justin
While Requisite Pro enforces a standard and that can certainly help you in your task, I'd certainly second Mark on trying to standardize the input by agreement with personnel and using a more flexible tool like Trac, Redmine (which both have incredibly fast deploy and setup times, especially if you host them from a VM) or even a custom one if you can get the management to endorse your project.
What open source toolkit does fatwire compare to and are there some particular advantages to fatwire?
How hard is fatwire to export out of and move to a free alternative?
How stable is it as a platform to write java extensions on?
From a development persepective, FatWire can be unfriendly. Having worked on a number of sites using this application it can easy bloat, and become difficult to maintain.
From a user perspective there has been alot of effort in the UI and this has led to a highly functional tool.
From a client perspective all clients bar 1 (a large news agency) were happy with the end result. FatWire can slow when using complex logic to generate menus or breadcumbs for example or when you have a large amount of content. This is the main reason the one client was unhappy. The FatWire site regularily struggled under the load. It sometimes seen as a solution to all web needs.
As such FatWire succeeds in serving Static Content & Semi Dynamic content, but can flounder when forced to do fully dynamic sites (from my experience).
From the original press release:
FatWire Software announced the rollout
of FirstSite, which is a set of tools
and best practices that helps
companies using FatWire Content Server
get their first Web site or
application running quickly while
providing a foundation for future
expansion. FirstSite includes a
collection of standard templates and
site components that are common to
most sites, combined with
documentation, training, a rich
developer community, and best
practices methodology. FatWire and its
solution partners are using FirstSite
as the basis for developing
content-centric applications for
specific vertical markets. With only
minor, cosmetic alterations,
developers can use the code in
FirstSite to implement a first site,
while simultaneously learning how to
utilize Content Server's capabilities,
such as dynamic content delivery,
personalization, caching, and product
catalogs.
Firstsite is not a product, unless this has changed since 2004 (unfortunately I cannot look, since their developer site is down). Fatwire's Content Server does not compare to any Open Source CMS that I know. It's scope goes much further. I will answer your questions one by one:
Advantages - There are many (or nobody would buy it, and it is not cheap)
On the delivery side: scalability, fine-grained cache control, stateless servlet architecture, ....
On the back office side: virtually no limit to asset types, dynamic content attributes, find-grained security and access control, ...
On the development side: Intelligently architected API with good coding productivity, tag library, ...
Openness
You cannot easily expect to migrate content between any two CMS products, open source or not. While there are ways to extract contant from the database in XML and other forms, using product tools, or simply at the database level, I don't think that this can be an argument for or against using a particular CMS. Ever tried to migrate from Drupal to Joomla?
Stable
I worked on several Fatwire implementations from 2000 to 2004 (back then it was OpenMarket Content Server, then Divine Content Server). It was stable enough for the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the S&P sites, and I would expect stability not to be an issue today.
Fatwire is really unique concept from developer point of view. It builds everything on a very abstract, extremely flexible clever asset modeling framework which is stored in relational database.
Application logic is based on "templates" which actually are pieces of JSP code. This JSP code is not like conventional Java, but tags instead. It takes very long from a developer to learn these tags and Fatwire asset api. Expect even months before skilled develpers start to be productive.
Almost nothing useable samples ships along the product. There is advertized "FirstSite" but it is way too simple for the purpose this product is used normally (huge complex sites). So pretty much everything has to be built from scratch.
Cache control is advertized to be one powerful feature. Yes it is, but we had extremely long learning curve and it never worked exactly like one assumed.
Wysiwyg editing has been missed from this product even it is advertized. At least during 2009 it had serious conceptual problems which practically prevented using it in live environments. But it was cool feature for demos and marketing of course. Today it might be fixed.
As a summary and if I were a customer with limited budget, I'd select any open source alternative instead. Mostly because development costs with Fatwire are high due the uniqueness of the product, lack of good documentation and extremely long learing curve. Of course the product price tag is also thing to consider.
And to answer to questions: you have to start from scratch if you move from Fatwire 6.0 to any open source alternative. And it is stable to build Java extensions on.
Fatwire stores content in relation database and file system. Depending on what type of content (structured/unstructured), Fatwire can be evaluated.