• The 2-Belo (unregistered)

    If only I had been here in time to post "Frist-eration!". I could have been a freaking legend.

    CAPTCHA: verto (the opposite of horizonto).

  • Look of Disapproval (unregistered) in reply to frits

    ಠ_ಠ

  • Anonymous (unregistered)

    The tags idea is not "that" bad. In fact, vBulletin uses <if> tags for their templates and it works pretty well. Of course, making the whole language (and not just the templates for the final HTML product) based on it is a dubious idea. Adding bobx to all the tag names is a little narcisistic and the whole assistant thing is retarded. But I love how well <if> tags work in vBulletin, I really do.

  • kahawe (unregistered) in reply to AWKScooby
    AWKScooby:
    Sun's Identity Manager (now called Oracle Waveset) has their own version of Bobx -- Xpress

    I wouldn't have expected anyone knows of the gem that is XPRESS on here! And don't forget the great XML Object language in OW / IDM! They sure can't emphasize the difference between those two enough!

    I mean, it awkwardly gets the job done - you can get your customizations up and running without a full redeploy - but it is still a cute WTF.

    But I am not sure if using Javascript instead is a good alternative... though it is something you could do. :-)

  • blah (unregistered)

    What's next? We find out that XBox is built on a Playstation?

  • yes it is (unregistered)

    Did Bob go on to invent XSL thus ensuring similar experiences for millions of programmers similarly conned into lousy dead end jobs?

  • Cheong (unregistered)

    I think while the use of BobX is WTF, Bob's concern about Christian's PHP injection code could be a valid one.

    If Christian didn't wrote it with care, that function could lead to all kinds of security vulunerabilities like when you try to inject your VB code (or any programming language you like) with batch commands through system() like calls.

  • EmperorOfCanada (unregistered)

    Ten years of getting cheques while others had brain hemorrhages makes Bob pretty smart. Evil but smart.

    I have seen a BobX before and the fun lasted until a new Linux Kernel came out. This BobX was literally a modification of some core Kernel code. A year of heated architecture arguments were won in an instant.

  • Dani (unregistered)

    Try to search BobX on google and see what comes up ;P

  • Daniel Sitnik (unregistered)

    <xbobprint>Hahahahaha funny!</xbobprint>

  • Anon the Coward (unregistered) in reply to frits

    ^ Idiot

  • sgt_shizzles (unregistered) in reply to frits

    "It's just a tool like Java, PHP, or C#."

    It's a freaking LOUSY tool, but I guess you could call it that.

  • Part-time PHP Programmer (unregistered)

    I don't know this Bob, but I hope he reads this article and notices that I hope he gets hit by a big freaking truck. He's cheated Darwinism for far too long.

  • oheso (unregistered) in reply to James
    James:
    ... anyone who uses Comic Sans font for a professional IT website is a character

    Anyone who uses Microsoft FrontPage or Word to create HTML and advertises web development services makes me reach for a baseball bat.

    I wish this were the only example of that I've seen ...

  • Shinobu (unregistered) 
    <xbobif condition="amount <= 12" >
...Some HTML here...
<xbobendif>
    The Real WTF® is that this isn't:
    <xbob:if xmlns:xbob="http://xbob.com/schema">

    xbob:condition
<xbob:comparison xbob:type="lt">
xbob:operand
<xbob:variable xbob:name="amount" />
</xbob:operand>
xbob:operand
<xbob:value xbob:type="integer">12</xbob:value>
</xbob:operand>
</xbob:comparison>
</xbob:condition>
xbob:pass
xbob:output...Some HTML here...</xbob:output>
</xbob:pass>
<xbob:fail />
</xbob:if>

  • omasque (unregistered) in reply to frits

    BOB????

  • k1 (unregistered) in reply to blah
    blah:
    What's next? We find out that XBox is built on a Playstation?
    No, but XBobx is built on XBox, and you can run only snes roms on it. Hey, it is the same thing, anyway, isn't it? Puzzle games, adventure, RPG, FPS (duck hunt), etc: you can play your favourite type.

    CYA

  • Kenosis (unregistered)

    One man's freedom-fighter is another man's rebel. Undoubtedly Christian managed to solve a couple of problems injecting php into BobX. Unfortunately this means introducing sections code "foreign" to the native environment.

    -KS

  • cicobuff (unregistered)

    The scarry thing is that I went through an almost exact experience except that BobX is called MichealX.

  • Dave (unregistered) in reply to DeGustibusNonDisputandumEst
    DeGustibusNonDisputandumEst:
    Maybe you should ask this guy: http://bobx.co.nz/

    Located in Timaru... yeah, he probably does live in a hole in the ground as the OP suspected. And runs a laptop off a generator for when they turn the power off at 9 every evening.

  • TC (unregistered)

    The WTFness was obvious at "half-wall cubicles". And don't get me started about PHP...

  • Sylver (unregistered)
    J.R. "Bob" Dobbs:
    Corey:
    Is it? Is it???? I humbly refer you to http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/09/has-joel-spolsky-jumped-the-shark.html

    I think Wasabi was already covered on TheDailyWTF (albeit with LOTS of obfuscation, the site called it WTFSL and the company was referred as a security company. I'm not linking the article due to Akismet being a PITA). This language is even more stupid than Wasabi since it isn't even compiled to PHP but runs on top of PHP (whose main selling points do not include speed)....

    To be fair, according to Joel, Wasabi doesn't just generate PHP. It also generate VBS and javascript. The issue they were solving was "how can you write the code once and then make an easy install on the client's own servers, regardless of the type of server. Their solution is to use something very similar to VBS (and compatible), so it looks like you could actually write in VBS and use Wasabi to generate PHP.

    In other words, wasabi sounds like a custom version of VBS with the added bonus of generating PHP on demand.

    The alternative would be to maintain different versions of the same codebase, or to force the client to install PHP on their servers as a prerequisite for installing Joel's software.

    That doesn't compare with a XML wrapper for PHP.

  • McK (unregistered) in reply to James
    James:
    I checked out the site:

    http://bobx.co.nz/

    ...and maybe it's just me, but anyone who uses Comic Sans font for a professional IT website is a character.

    Mate... have you ever been to Timaru? I don't think font choice is a primary concern. Sheep-dipping, yes.

  • Hal (unregistered) in reply to frits

    LOL.

    Just like a tool? A parser inside another parser? ahahah

  • XBob 360 (unregistered)

    this reminds me of some software we were made to write for cisco phones a few years back. I say we were made to write, my then boss had the great idea of inventing our own vendor neutral xml-y format that would then be converted into cisco's own phone markup, another derivative of xml. for some reason best known to the boss we weren't allowed to use xslt transformations and had to build all of the phone markup in C# code. screens took days just to build up and the "rendering methods" were hundreds of lines long, littered with xpath, string.format and if statement nesting into double figures. I quit not long afterwards, but not before getting to know the System.Xml namespace rather bloody well.

  • Christian (unregistered) in reply to frits

    A little gem in this that I think I just missed to mention: A seasoned programmer, using this language for 5 years now (which I find an unspeakable horror all by itself) Gave me an estimate for the reordering job: 2 full days at least, maybe more if you run into "problems" like white spaces in places it does not like, which the parsers does nothing to tell you where those might be of course. The job in PHP, would have been about 7 lines of code.

    And to add insult to injury, the environment had no version control actually, no development environment (the seasoned developer worked directly with an FTP capable text editor on the live scripts, which would upload it when he hit save), no backups of any kind in-house (bob does those) and allowed you no real debugging, because it ran the code in it's own parser.

    Looking under the hood, revealed over 500 functions defined (user defined, not internal ones!) and only 5 user defined classes being used. It must have been the best system ever, 10 years ago.

  • santo (unregistered) in reply to frits

    This comment is justified only if you are Bob.

  • Christian (unregistered)

    Did I ask about the environment? Yes. It's all handled by our partner, so we don't have to do it, saving us time and headache (makes sense, company is pretty small).

    Coldfusion? I was steering clear of it, but I found, when looking for other places where this abhorrend language was used (it's using a different prefix than bobx) similar things that were from coldfusion. My conclusion was he just tried rebuilding a "better" coldfusion inside PHP.

    Security? What security? Everyone in the office knew all the passwords for everything, that would allow you to copy and delete everything. And my code producing vulnerabilities is rather unlikely, when the entire page at one point probably runs an eval over the code.

    Oh and another tasty bit: The fields from the database, aka the assistants, are numbered. So you want the customers name, that is field number 1. You want his address, that's in fields 5, 6 and 7. Of course there are multiple companies running their "software", each with their own database setup. So while on company A the customer name is in field 1, it's probably in field 3 or 10 on the company B assistant. If you delete a field in between, they get renumbered too. Randomly. And your code has these numbers all over the place. No constants, no variables definitions possible to deal with the problem either, as it does curious things if you try to predefine variables.

    And deleting rows from the assistants by code is also funny. You run the delete query a few times in a row, just to be sure, as on the first couple passes it usually doesn't delete all.

  • not bobx really (unregistered) in reply to frits

    bobx == ant amirite?

  • dr. Hannibal Lecter (unregistered)

    I don't know who Bob is, but I so want to punch him in the face after reading this.

    That bastard.

  • Bob Hater (unregistered) in reply to frits

    Get lost Bob you jobs worth.

  • (cs)

    You know that great language that you use every day at work (be it Java, C, C#, Python, Ruby, PHP, or whatever)? At some point in time it was also a homegrown language. TRWTF isn't that they invented their own programming language, or even that the one they invented sucked monkey balls (inventing languages is hard, so most attempts will fail). Its that they continue to insist on using it after it has been demonstrated that it sucks monkey balls.

  • Peter (unregistered) in reply to Jerim
    Jerim:
    He literally could hold the company hostage.
    I doubt it, though he might be able to do it metaphorically, or hold the servers hostage literally.
  • Anon Too (unregistered) in reply to oheso
    oheso:
    James:
    ... anyone who uses Comic Sans font for a professional IT website is a character

    Anyone who uses Microsoft FrontPage or Word to create HTML and advertises web development services makes me reach for a baseball bat.

    I wish this were the only example of that I've seen ...

    For a small utility app that I had to write once, just to be a dick I set all the fonts to comic sans.

  • (cs)

    Am I the only one who thought of this Bob upon seeing the title?

    After all, it also had "Assistants"... scary!

  • Tom Oliver Rex (unregistered) in reply to Drew
    Drew:
    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.

    Be afraid, be very afraid. Especially if you work in retail systems in the UK, where one prominent-ish vendor does exactly that...

  • Goslingson (unregistered) in reply to Daniel
    Daniel:
    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.

    Java hasn't been "interpreted" for about a decade now. You're fired

  • Kyle Z. (unregistered)

    AbilideBob

    Captcha: sagaciter. maybe where Sagat has born?

  • DeaDPooL (unregistered) in reply to icebrain
    icebrain:
    I like BobX [NSFW].

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

    Damn you.

  • Bob (unregistered)

    You lesser developers just don't have the mental horsepower to understand why my infrastructure is superior to your puny tools. Don't try to understand - just leave the hard stuff to us genius folks. I wouldn't want you to hurt yourselves.

  • zelly (unregistered) in reply to frits

    Nice try, Bob.

  • (cs) in reply to Bert
    Bert:
    TRWTF is PHP.

    What!?!?!?! BobX has got to be running neck and neck with PHP. I give the edge to BobX in a close one.

  • Corey (unregistered) in reply to Sylver
    Sylver:
    In other words, wasabi sounds like a custom version of VBS with the added bonus of generating PHP on demand.

    The alternative would be to maintain different versions of the same codebase, or to force the client to install PHP on their servers as a prerequisite for installing Joel's software.

    That doesn't compare with a XML wrapper for PHP.

    You're right... it's far worse.

  • Rory (unregistered)

    BobX certainly sounds like the future! I hope I can keep up.

  • Snipes (unregistered)

    Did anyone send a link of this article to the support address at bobx.co.nz? come on, we just >have< to know if its him ..... I'm not doing it though, a genius of that level might be able to track me down .....

  • Frank (unregistered) in reply to frits

    Bob?

  • (cs)
    <xbobloop statement="AssistantName" > <xbobprint> .. write table content here .. <xbobprint> <xbobendloop>
    Oh, yes. Little BobX Tables, we call it.
  • Jason Evans (unregistered) in reply to frits

    Bob sounds like he's a real gaylord, backwards, dumbass developer.

  • Doc (unregistered) in reply to bl@h

    Yes, they would. We've had people write proprietary interfaces and code to duplicate/circumvent open standards time and time again. The main cause seems to be that open standards don't allow the architect to sufficiently express their own personal "genius", and also don't provide the necessary lock-in required to keep said genius employed long-term.

  • Developer (unregistered)

    I'm not sure why there's such derision for BobX. It looks remarkably like ColdFusion to me.

    I mean, I spent two years in a ColdFusion job -- I took it thinking that disguising code as HTML was a stupid idea, and by the time I left I was sure that disguising code as HTML was a really stupid thing to do, and that any company that was dumb enough to use ColdFusion deserved to fail and lose all its investors' money, but clearly my opinion is not universal or ColdFusion would no longer exist.

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