• Gabriel (unregistered) in reply to THG

    I suspect that the real WTF is that a person named Xerxes would turn XML even if you didn't wan't to... Besides the Super WELL FORMED XML.

  • Vladimir (unregistered)

    Looks like what I saw from Motorola.

  • blondie (unregistered) in reply to jonnyq

    I'v never seen it personally but once an AS400 guy told me how you programm an AS400 it was exactly the same as the fixed position input. All files are like records in a fixed postion format...

  • another_drone (unregistered) in reply to havokk
    havokk:
    > A vendor — one that, for the record, he had no choice but to work with

    It makes me both sad and annoyed when I see things like that because the only way we have of dealing with crap like this is to vote with our wallets.

    I read the stories here and I really wonder how some of these outfits are still in business. Is it that we, as an industry, are bad at writing CBAs or is it that there are a lot of managers who don't care about the bottom line?

    B

    Managers care about the bottom line. They should. But so many of them are not concerned with the bottom line, they are concerned with their line item cost. And there-in lies the problem. I was recently on a project and we had to choose from vendorA and vendorB. VendorB was half the price of vendorA, but vendorA had an out-of-the-box solution, vendor b was customisable ( not configuarble, custom, as in pay us and we will write what you actaully needs, rather than what we have ). I asked, what about maintenance costs, consulting costs , and internal costs. "Oh, they can't possibly be that expensive."

  • Dominic T (unregistered)

    Actually, this isn't that much different from the "XML" format Apple's iTunes exports as backups of it's library data.

    That looks like (and I'm paraphrasing this)

    <track id=12323482137468726afjhgf> <key>Artist</key><value>Jonothan Coulton</value> <key>Song Name</key><value>Code Monkey ..... </track>

    It is nicely indented, and is well formed, but you have to parse it all by hand....

  • Some Jerk (unregistered)

    Though it isn't GOOD... I don't think their implementation is bad enough to be a WTF. I have received data-structures via web service that were so unbearably complex that I spent hours just figuring out where field values were. While strange, their idea of creating a column header and column value representation is ... silly but at least understandable. The web request interests me more, because it looks like it was designed for a telnet / custom tcp client interface. I wonder if these fools basically added these as entrypoints to their existing software... instead of attempting the infrastructural changes that might be required to fully implement a service oriented architecture.

    CAPTCHA: aptent -> where applications reside when they don't have Windows

  • oksupra.com (unregistered)

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  • lumnar (unregistered) in reply to KeithLM

    ITunes is surely one of the biggest WTF programs ever "written." I'd love to see the source code; I bet it'd peel my eyeballs.

  • ullamcorper (unregistered) in reply to yzaf

    If I had the choice of employing beldred or the maker of the XML in the article, I'd know whom I'd choose.

    beldred gets the concept of XML and how it can provide value. If he also knows when not to use XML, then he's in. The spaces in the tags can be taken care of by a good book or a two-day crash course.

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