Sharp as a Marble

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Dyin'

Geekdom

Lord, this is some crazy, boring, overly complex, useless crap.

Too many times (and this is one of them) software people confuse "flexibility" with "easy to use". Reusability is a dangerous game. You can engineer software so that it can be reused anywhere, but that tends to require a lot of external support for common tasks. Over engineer it, and it becomes just as difficult to implement as it would have been to have it too tightly coupled.

That is what I'm experiencing right now. Just to get a single field onto the screen, you have to call a web service that is a wrapper around another web service. That web service has to load an XSD file, then make a call to an internal process that then calls the business web service. The XML document comes back and has to be translated through the original XSD. The resultant data set is then passed to a JavaScript class which loops through the data until it finds the field you wish to display.

Lord help you if a single piece of any of that is out of synch.

We spent the entire first day just trying to get our development environments to at least run. It's all open source stuff, but we require something like 100 plug ins to just get anything on screen.

Flexible? I guess. But the man hours required to maintain the flexibility are unfathomable.

posted @ 2/24/2009 12:26:43 PM

Comments

Rob K says:

on 2/24/2009 1:57:04 PM

Byzantine is the word, and I feel your pain. Been there, done that, (literally) got the T shirt.

MadRocketScientist says:

on 2/24/2009 2:00:33 PM

Hey, I get to spend time converting some Excel VB Macros into a freestanding Java application. And to make it even more fun, the VB Macros were developed from an older FORTRAN77 free standing application. And both the FORTRAN code & the VB code were written by men who had zero formal training with writing code, so there is no commenting and the program structure can only be described as "chaotic".

DN says:

on 2/24/2009 4:13:18 PM

"OS" is short for "Operating System", "Open Source", "Oh, Shit", and "Others' Software".

Robb Allen says:

on 2/24/2009 4:18:30 PM

I once had to debug an application that had a class with a single function that was 28 pages printed.

Matt says:

on 2/24/2009 4:54:02 PM

I'd kill them. It's why I design solutions that keep the controlling layers to a minimum. Generally two and at most three: a low-level framework to abstract transport and data retrieval behavior and a higher level business logic/DAO tier that the application developers interact with independently of the UI.

The web tier (servlet and JSP in my world) is decoupled. The servlets act as glue to the business objects and DAOs.

My code depends on OSS to provide low-level and utility functionality but I would never try to hide those behind additional layers of abstraction.

That's the danger of outsourcing without tight customer (meaning: your) oversight. There should always be a customer-side architect/senior lead overseeing the design and implementation of any outsourced solution. Pleas for this more often than not fall on deaf management ears.

I feel your pain, Robb. I've been there. It is often better in the long run to rewrite such a system after getting the original solution in place. But management doesn't like to hear that they've just wasted $X because they were too lazy to task someone to make sure the contractors were doing their job right.

I operate on a golden rule when writing code: Write for the programmer who will maintain it following you. They'll thank you. Often, that person will be you.

Too bad I don't know how to offer consulting on straightforward and effective software design solutions. Mine aren't sexy and cutting edge but they are maintainable and they work. I'm sure you'll be trying to do a lot of that with the disaster you just inherited.

Apparently your departing people were asleep when covering the section on "maintenance". Being clever is NOT a desirable quality in an effective programming. I'll take boring, compact, targeted and elegant over elaborate, complex and "flexible" any day of the week.

MadRocketScientist says:

on 2/25/2009 12:28:45 PM

I once had to debug an application that had a class with a single function that was 28 pages printed.

I'd track that author down and violate his/her kneecaps with a tire iron.

Nomen Nescio says:

on 2/26/2009 3:42:15 PM

I'd track that author down and violate his/her kneecaps with a tire iron.

i've seen a single statement of Perl just over 200 characters long. i've got a vague idea of what it does, from comparing its output to its input, but i'm still not at all sure how that comes about. yes, it's still in production use.

Rob K says:

on 2/27/2009 2:00:37 PM

I once worked on a C++ program that had a 16000 line function, made of layer upon layer of nested switch statements.

Comments have been closed on this topic.