On our way to Newport today we stopped at an architectural salvage and antique shop.

Back in the corner of a cavernous warehouse of huge wooden bars and doors and panels, rescued from a day where wood was still around for the wealthy, and the wealthy were around Newport, were a bunch of little plastic boats.

I asked one of the owners what they were.

He and his family invented a ride called bumper boats. The boats themselves use electric motors running on rechargeable batteries, and use an inflatable pool as their "ring."

It amazes me when I think of the relative simplicity of taking a design to implementation in this day and age.

Gone are the barriers that would have prevented an inventor from going directly to a plastic molding company for a relatively small order, or taking an engineering concept and making it real.

I think of this in relation to Joomla. Not only are the technologies and engineered components available, but inventors can find the engineers and "manufacturers" to make an idea a reality more easily than ever before.

With production costs lowered or eliminated, more resources can be devoted now to the information architecture, the engineering of an application or web idea.

It's been on the way for sometime, but I believe Joomla in particular will help push open source into new territories.

Drupal is too limited a developer pool, and to stringent a framework. Using the bumper boat metaphor, you would have to build sheet metal boats and hire someone to recaulk and rerivet the flotilla frequently. DotNetNuke forces you to buy only Microsoft's water, which means additional costs and risks for everyone involved. The boats also require power cords, limiting how many boats you can put in the water safely, and mukking up the works. Microsoft solutions themselves have so many costs and contigencies required that you simply could not get to market at all using their solutions.

Joomla is so flexible and modular that if you wanted to use the same basic chassis and make the boats pedal powered, chances are someone has already figured it out and is not only willing but anxious to have another inventor put his or her idea to the test.

The moral?