• pluma (unregistered)

    SECOND!

  • The Nerve (unregistered)

    The creator of Hibernate and it's bastard child HQL admitted that he created a whole new way to query because he couldn't understand and couldn't be bothered to learn SQL. Something tells me that BobX was created with the same premise.

  • Guest (unregistered)

    To me it sounds like "bob" simply tries to make sure he won't be loosing his stream of income any time soon ...

  • Burpy (unregistered)

    Why do 80% of all ERPs think they're worth their own home made language???

  • (cs)

    I find all you BobX haters so frusterating. I mean, it's just a tool like Java, PHP, or C#. The real value is in getting the job done. And if I can do it using BobX, well screw you and good for me.

  • (cs)

    OK, the in-house language is a serious WTF, both in the fact that they have one and in its specific nature. The fact that Christian didn't ask about the server platform at interview time is a personal WTF that is nobody's fault but his.

    The supermega WTF, however, is running all your company's IT systems on infrastructure owned by a contractor that nobody has ever met.

  • sui (unregistered)
    A parser written in a parser

    Wouldn't surprise me if BobX is only a abstraction layer of the php smarty template engine.

  • (cs)

    I love how there's no company in the world that can use an COTS ERP system, but MUST create one in-house to deal with such complex tasks as tracking customers, or orders, or processing invoices.

    I often wonder if the development "team" just feeds management this line of bullshit to be able to spend months re-inventing the wheel instead of buying something customizable.

    And, you have to love the "self-proclaimed genius programmer doesn't like Feature X of Language Y, so he creates his own abstraction language that cons the entire company into using it". I cannot think of ANYONE sane in the real world who would willingly take a job working with some obscure language that is only used by one company in the entire world. Unless you plan on never leaving that company, what benefit do you gain?

  • MP (Real) (unregistered)

    This just makes me want to cry.

  • bl@h (unregistered)

    I call shenanigans, no company would do this.

    Or would they?

  • James (unregistered)

    To be fair, the server could have been compromised because of poor PHP code :)

  • One of the IT Crowd (unregistered) in reply to bl@h

    Anyone else suspect that Bob == Brian ?

  • DeGustibusNonDisputandumEst (unregistered) in reply to bl@h

    Maybe you should ask this guy: http://bobx.co.nz/

  • (cs)

    I program in BobB, it's just like programming in B only simpler!

  • Keloran (unregistered)

    BobX aka Smarty, hmm sounds too familar to me, i wonder if i ever worked at that company

  • Corey (unregistered)

    I used to work for a company that used BobX ~2003, only by that point it was already called ColdFusion.

  • Drew (unregistered)

    Did anyone else misread the title and expect a article about a new database type that was specifically for XML? I'm imagining a whole relational database made up of nothing but XML Blob columns...

    ...I scared myself.

  • The Nerve (unregistered)

    I'm glad Christian got hammered. He's not a team player. Too many times, you've got developers going rogue writing code that no one else knows how to maintain. The next thing you know, Christian would have been converting massive parts of the system to non-BobX code. Maybe he would have read a book on Java over the weekend and started writing Java Beans and JSF. Then that wouldn't be enough for him and he would start with Groovy.

  • AnonymousX (unregistered)

    This story can't possibly be true, it's far too ridiculous

  • NotBob (unregistered)

    We had a guy who developed a rather similar web-page-from-database-generating "language", circa 1995. As an alternative to hand-coded C/C++ applications it was great (for its time), but it rapidly fell into disuse when ASP came along

  • Alekz (unregistered)

    Looks like custom tag libraries for JEE apps?

  • My Name Is Missing (unregistered)

    It's clear to me that Bob is a Terrorist.

  • NC (unregistered) in reply to Corey
    Corey:
    I used to work for a company that used BobX ~2003, only by that point it was already called ColdFusion.

    Hah, beaten to it. When the sample code was shown the first thing I thought was that BobX was code for ColdFusion.

  • Anon (unregistered)

    Hah! So now we know what TDWTF forum system was written in.

  • Maskime (unregistered)

    It does look like ColdFusion.

    To me Bob is friend with Brian and this was their way to be sure to have a regular income... 'Cause the guy can not ask for a PHP developper in the first place if he doesn't know that the whole stuff is working with that in background...

  • (cs)

    SpectateSwamp has a potential business partner.

  • icebrain (unregistered)

    I like BobX [NSFW].

    On a serious note, that HTML tag-like system is used in WACT, but only in templates, where is fits.

  • Bogolese (unregistered)

    All your base are belong to us

  • Buzz Killington (unregistered)

    Definitely thought it was Coldfusion too.

  • Corey (unregistered) in reply to AnonymousX
    AnonymousX:
    This story can't possibly be true, it's far too ridiculous

    Is it? Is it???? I humbly refer you to http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/09/has-joel-spolsky-jumped-the-shark.html

  • Zaratustra (unregistered)

    "I didn't hack the server, I xbobhacked the server."

  • (cs)
    <xbobif condition="amount <= 12" > ...Some HTML here... <xbobendif>

    That's not an XML end tag. Or an XML attribute. So BobX is XML minus well-formed document checking. Nice.

  • Jon (unregistered)

    ... and then Bob went on to develop Apache Ant.

  • (cs) in reply to ObiWayneKenobi
    ObiWayneKenobi:
    I love how there's no company in the world that can use an COTS ERP system, but MUST create one in-house to deal with such complex tasks as tracking customers, or orders, or processing invoices.
    Wait, I'm confused. If all a company needs to do is process a few invoices then why should they spend a zillion dollars on a fancy-pants ERP system?

    I think that the cost-benefit ratio of ERP, CRM, ESB and all that other crap tends to follow an inverted parabolic curve. There's a happy medium in there somewhere when it makes sense - you're running a big company with hundreds of thousands of customers and are still working off Excel spreadsheets and access databases. Definitely, buy an ERP. But if your company is small or has a very simple/straightforward process, it's far less expensive to get a good developer to blast something out in 2-4 weeks. On the other hand, if your process has so many twists and turns that you can't even draw up a legible flow chart, all of that "customization" essentially becomes custom development anyway and you're just pissing away money.

    OK, so there's probably little to no justification for creating an entire in-house templating language just to squirt out a few invoices. I'm not saying that this particular story is a good example of a rational cost-benefit analysis or sound development practices. But come on, almost every off-the-shelf TLA that's designed to be "customized" is a bottomless pit of expense and despair. Most companies would be justified in avoiding them.

  • Daniel (unregistered)

    Not only does the syntax look similar to ColdFusion, but the implementation is similar. ColdFusion is implemented as a Java Servlet so it's an interpreter running in a java byte code interpreter which is just as bad.

  • Box (unregistered)

    I switched to Java now

  • Jon Kiji (unregistered) in reply to frits
    frits:
    I find all you BobX haters so frusterating. I mean, it's just a tool like Java, PHP, or C#. The real value is in getting the job done. And if I can do it using BobX, well screw you and good for me.

    I agree, I code in JonX which is a layer on top of basic to make it strcutured like ASM with Python-like objects and all of this poured in a neat XML layout.

    It takes only 4 days to code a very decent 'Hello, world!', it gets the job done alright. Unfortunately I cannot get anyone to hire me, something to do with costs or something.

  • Anonymously Yours (unregistered)

    I can't help but notice BobX looks suspiciously like the hell that is ColdFusion.

    <xbobloop statement="AssistantName" >
<xbobprint> .. write table content here .. <xbobprint>
<xbobendloop>

    ... in CF would be...

    <cfloop query="QueryName" >
<cfoutput> .. write table content here .. </cfoutput>
</cfloop>
  • Balentius (unregistered) in reply to ObiWayneKenobi
    ObiWayneKenobi:
    I love how there's no company in the world that can use an COTS ERP system, but MUST create one in-house to deal with such complex tasks as tracking customers, or orders, or processing invoices.

    I often wonder if the development "team" just feeds management this line of bullshit to be able to spend months re-inventing the wheel instead of buying something customizable.

    One problem I've seen (at two companies now, so it's a trend - right??? :) ) is that it starts off as a small company, and they do stuff with Excel. Then, they get larger, and eventually realize that Excel isn't a great application for this sort of thing, and someone generates a small program to do the same functions, plus one or two extras.
    At that point, it is "the system", and it now becomes difficult to remove. Instead, more and more gets bolted on to it, and eventually you end up with a monster that takes a large amount of time to make the smallest changes. However, you can't replace it, because it now controls everything but the coffee pot (probably because that hasn't been requested yet...) So, when they go to look at a "professional" system, they see that it costs a ridiculous amount of money, to do only some of the same things that the existing system does.

    No evil involved here, just legacy code and tightwad management. (Yes, the programmers at the previous company I worked at TRIED to get a new system, but were told that it was too expensive.)

  • unwesen (unregistered)

    Except for the "implemented in PHP" bit, it sounds a bit like what I had to deal with in a previous job. I had hoped I was the only one.

    This one wasn't implemented in PHP, but a real Apache module. The scripting language had quirks like switch statements nested in if statements would work, but not if statements inside switch statements. Or vice versa, I forgot.

    It had a module subsystem - really quite useful. But the inventor of the scripting language didn't really think that anything but strings or integers would be passed to and from modules. So as a later addition, they hacked the module code to pass complex objects... internally, object pointers would be serialized to hexadecimal string representations and passed as strings, and then deserialized and dereferenced on the other side.

    Yep. Any parameter starting with "0x" followed by hexadecimal digits would get let you overwrite that memory location.

  • zdux (unregistered)

    is there a bobx.Net ? I like xml and pain

  • ReallyCalledBob (unregistered) in reply to Anonymously Yours

    Actually it would be:

    <cfoutput query="queryName">
    #TableContent#
</cfoutput>
  • Amtep (unregistered)

    Now why didn't Christian just write a PHP to BobX compiler? That would have saved him so much trouble.

  • AWKScooby (unregistered)

    Sun's Identity Manager (now called Oracle Waveset) has their own version of Bobx -- Xpress. It's an object-oriented LISP derivative, that's wrapped up in XML, and interpreted in Java.

    x += 10 would be written as:

    <add> <ref>x</ref> 10 </add>

    But hey, they get to put a check mark on the box next to XML...

  • Skilldrick (unregistered)

    Don't you mean "Might as well be brainf*ck"? I assume you're talking about the language:

    +++++++++[<+++++++++++++>-]<+.-------------.+++..-------.++++++++++++++.>++++++[<----------->-]<-.+.+++++++++++++++.>+++++[<++++++++>-]<+.++.--.>++++++[<---------->-]<+.>+++++++[<++++++++>-]<.+++.

  • Bert (unregistered)

    TRWTF is PHP.

  • Cailin Coilleach (unregistered) in reply to Guest
    Guest:
    To me it sounds like "bob" simply tries to make sure he won't be loosing his stream of income any time soon ...
    ++

    Sounds to me like this Bob's a fscking smart guy!

  • (cs) in reply to Amtep
    Amtep:
    Now why didn't Christian just write a PHP to BobX compiler? That would have saved him so much trouble.

    Better still, develop "ChristianY", which is implemented in BobX. And then leverage it to force out Bob....

  • Kyle Z. (unregistered) in reply to One of the IT Crowd
    One of the IT Crowd:
    Anyone else suspect that Bob == Brian ?

    Totally.

  • Bryan The K (unregistered) in reply to Kyle Z.
    Kyle Z.:
    One of the IT Crowd:
    Anyone else suspect that Bob == Brian ?

    Totally.

    Has anyone ever seen Bob and Brian in the same room together? It's kind of like Batman and Bruce Wayne.

Leave a comment on “We Use BobX”

Log In or post as a guest

Replying to comment #:

Log Out

« Return to Article