Re: Tales from the Dark Side

Hi Geoff,

2006/3/15, Geoff Hopson <[email protected]>:
> Anyway, this post appeared on the
> RoR mailing list from an ex-WO developer. I thought it made interesting
> reading,

Yeah, that was fun. Just a few remarks here:

> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Michael Engelhart <[email protected] >

> from a desire to develop something that was
> "like" WebObjects because at the time there was a lot of uncertainty around
> the fate of WebObjects and I was also concerned that the community was so
> small I felt it would be hard to find skilled developers as we grew.

Same old, same old... some people worry too much instead of getting
the job done. "We need something like WebObjects, but not quite WO
because of the uncertainty..." - they certainly mean the uncertainty
that is only felt by the people who spread it and help spread it like
Mr. Engelhart.

> WebObjects, in my opinion is the best Java based tool for building database
> driven sites but I couldn't risk using it since it was very poorly supported
> by Apple at the time.

IMHO the question is if there is _any_ open source solution out there
that can *promise* more support - that's ridiculous, the main argument
against using open source has always been the lack of support. Just
take a look at sourceforge, there are loads of dead projects whose
code hasn't been touched for years or who have remained in the
"planning" state for much too long.

> Tapestry is a very complex MVC framework that had some points that were
> similar to WebObjects but

... so he switched to Tapestry and Hibernate and was unhappy...

> Time after time when
> researching something in the forums I came to the conclusion that core
> developers were the most arrogant SOB's I'd ever come across.

Yeah, open source support is so much better, don't you think, Mr. Engelhart?

> So after 4-5 months of this, Ruby on Rails came to my attention as the news
> surrounding it increased.

So let's jump onto the next bandwagon...

> But after seeing the video,

I, too, always change development tools after watching a video ;-)

> so I put in front of my
> team an option to take 2 weeks off from further Java development to attempt
> a port of our 25,000 lines of code to Rails

Do these people live on welfare or do they receive any kind of
subsidies from the government so that they are able to waste two weeks
on trying out a new environment and port their app? Normal companies
have work to do and projects to finish in order to _make_money_.
Normal companies are pretty focused on making money and also very
focused on the core competence surrounding their development
environment.

> At the end of the day, the risk that we took has paid off in spades.  My
> team is happy at work every day and we are pumping out more code and
> features then I ever could have imagined was possible with such a small
> team.

...after losing two weeks while playing around. How productive could
the same team have been had they stayed with WO and not wasted those
weeks (add their Tapestry / Hibernate experiments to that...)

> But under a
> more realistic heavy load situation of 5 simultaneuous users we are seeing
> 200-300 ms response times.

So 5 simultaneous users are considered heavy load these days? *Giggle*

Ceph