On demand

This page describes a concept which is part of our glossary

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Printing On Demand

• W:Espresso Book Machine - print books on demand - general concept
• Lightning Source
  • List of on-demand printing businesses
• On Demand Books (ODB)
• Lulu

Production On Demand (POD)

• Zazzle - on-demand printing of merchandise
• CafePress - on-demand printed merchandise and CD/DVD's
• finerworks.com and CanvasOnDemand - printing/framing/mounting photos on canvas
• Affordable 3D metal printing available

On Demand in Software Architecture

This concept of production on demand also plays an important role in software architecture and programming environments. Complex applications like office suites and content management systems can have huge arrays of diverse components and modules. Applying the on-demand paradigm in this context simply means to only load those components into memory when their first required.

This issue is closely related to the programming environment as well, for example the so-called "stateless" paradigm which is the client-server/request-response system used on the web is not a very on-demand environment. This is because every request has to run its own instance of the server application. Although shared-object architectures can help with this, it would be supported from the ground up in a peer-to-peer architecture.

See also

• Open Source hardware
• Fiver.com - cheap online services of all kinds