Key issues to consider when deciding between Islandora and Hydra as front-ends to a Fedora Repository

Islandora uses Drupal as a frontend for a Fedora Repository, Hydra integrates Solr with a fedora repository and serves as a Ruby on Rails platform for running the front end to a Fedora repository.

If an organization has decided they want to use Fedora and is deciding between running these two potential front-end systems what specific comparative issues should they be considering?

I'm particularly interested in differences in terms of:

• resources to implement
• resources to maintain
• necessary IT infrastructure
• technical knowledge for staff running the system
• flexibility in what they can accomplish
• differences in communities related to their open source software dependencies

Oh, and if there are other key issues you think should be on this list feel free to suggest edits to the question.

Trevor Owens

• software
• content-management
• infrastructure

Comments

• jcmeloni: The nature of the product development is going to render any answers moot over a period of time, and thus not useful to people in the future (for some value of future). It's also an incredibly broad question: the answer (at a certain period in time) has been/would be a whole presentation at the Open Repositories conference. What would be a good SE question (IMHO) would be the factors to consider when selecting a repository ingest & frontend system (for which you have the start of a good answer in your question), because players are going to come and go.