Re: Moving forward

[Robert Myers <ccrider@whiterose.net>]

On Sun, 4 Jun 2000, Aaron Turner wrote:

> I'm a bit confused... didn't Jason tell you?

	Yes, he did.

> The reason for trashing the current site and code boils down to one basic
> problem: scaleability

	Isn't this a problem that could be solved by re-coding the site at
a later date?


> The code was not scaling in terms of modularity and performance.
> functions.php3 was almost 1,500 lines of code, was poorly commented, and
> difficult to manage.  Furthermore, a key function which is a part of
> nearly every page had a 7-8sec runtime on a PIII-733Mhz.  Our analysis of
> the problem indicated that it was a problem with PHP itself- optimizing
> the code would have little effect.  Moving to PHP4 did not look like it
> would resolve the performance problem completely and it would have no
> effect on the modularity issue.
> 

	I talked with Jay about this a little bit, he said that this was a
result of the comments section for the articles.  Wouldn't it have been
prudent to move that functionality to a later time frame of the project?


> And the modularity of the code was causing Jason tremendous problems with
> fixing bugs.  It also made it nearly impossible for anyone other than
> Jason to actually work on the code.  Frankly, nobody but Jason really
> understands the code though I know you and Daniel understand parts of it.
> Not to mention, nearly impossible to add any more developers to the
> project in the future.
> 

	Well.  I agree.  Documentation was the last thought on anyones
mine.

> Which brings us to the decision to bag it all.  Basically, we (Jason
> really) could fix the bugs and add some basic functionality in about 2
> months.  It would not however fix the 7-8sec execution per page; which
> would render the site basically unuseable, nor did we have a real solution
> for this without *major* code re-write which would take significantly
> longer.
> 

	See my note above about the comments portion.  7-8 seconds is
definately unacceptable.

> Jason has for a long time wanted to re-write the backend using CORBA, and
> we decided that we could either start on this now or wait a few more
> months.  After looking at our options, it appeared that waiting any
> further would be wasting our time on "dead code".  I want to make it clear
> that Jason, Daniel, and I were all in agreement in this and everyone had
> took a few days to think it over before we decided on a course of action.
> 

	The code is not really dead, and the time is not really
waisted.  The program logic could easily be moved to another
language.  This is really all a part of a program lifecycle, as new
technologies, and new ideas emerge, the old code is really either thrown
away or whatever.

> It also has another major benifit- OODS is applicable to a lot more
> projects than just the LKB.  This means we should find it significanly
> easier to find developers interested in contributing.  CORBA also allows
> us to utilize a plethora of languages which should prevent simular issues
> to thoses of the PHP performance issue.

	Yes, I know about OODS.  And I also know Corba will help out the
project more.  I am still confused about why it is just all dumped like
that.  It seemed as though the last time I worked with Jay on the code,
that you guys were so close to having something, albeit not the grandious
(sp) thing that Jay wanted it to be, but something none the less.

-Bob 
ccrider@whiterose.net
Systems Administrator for whiterose.net
http://www.whiterose.net