I want to put up a proposal that my organisation should have a semi-official server on which staff could code their own server-side solutions to smallish local problems. Is there a word for this, and established practices and procedures?

Background: I work for a big, diverse company. Let's say it's a publishing house with many magazines under its umbrella, each with a website or sites.

We have an official IT department, and if I want a publishing tool created, technically

Problem: There are tons of projects which aren't big enough even to trouble that committee -- example, an Excel spreadsheet is produced every week by a third party comprising a pop music chart. I wrote a Perl CGI script in about half an hour which uploads the spreadsheet, parses it and FTPs the resulting HTML table to the web server.

Nobody wants to go through a formal proposal, let alone pay development costs, for a job as small as that. It would take longer to write the proposal than write the script.

So, as I've got a recent Mac, and all recent Macs come with Apache, Perl, MySQL, PHP and so on, it just runs on my machine. Other renegades like me run things like blogs, contacts databases and cron jobs in the same way.

But these unofficial machines could crash, suffer HD failure or any number of other things. What would benefit the organisation is a machine which could do server-side processing, but which ran programs which didn't require our IT department to write them.

I expect that it would work like an ISP. Everyone gets a folder and can write scripts in that folder. The IT people would back it up every night, install modules on request and so on, run a CVS server, but take a hands-off approach. User permissions would take care of my code accidentally over-writing your website, and if I over-write mine, tough luck, and I presumably signed a document which says so.

Questions: Is there a name for a setup like this? A two-tier system where there are official IT-supported applications, plus "amateur" applications? Will the IT people hate my idea with the burning intensity of 1,000 suns? What can go wrong? What have I missed? What are the objections I will face? What's best practice in this situation, if any?

Note: I don't want to write audience-facing dynamic code at all. That's the big church-and-state division at work and I respect that. I just want to write employee-facing code which automates web publishing and related tasks.


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In reply to OT: Is there a word for a semi-official server? by Cody Pendant

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