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Admin
dear lord..
Admin
What, no comments? So he likes straight, black Java in big gulps, so what ^^? Comments and sweetener are for sissies.
Admin
NICE!
First Post?
Admin
Well, it wouldn't have been a proper dotcom if it survived the bubble...
Admin
MS-Access has a similar three-layer structure: the front-end, the back-end, and the caveman-sloping forehead of the "Access developer/architect" at the keyboard.
Admin
If he not use templates, his code will be horrible. But with templates, that can be a nice thing.
I mean, YES, as most data-centered code on the oracle side. Bussiness logic on java, and templates for display. What is sooo wrong here?
Admin
No templates.
One servlet with one huuge method.
no abstraction of DB access.
Isn't that enough?
/wtf indeed
Admin
Must update my portfolio count. Didn't know each page was an "application".
Admin
This is awesome!
I am going to embrace this, writing my CV.
Admin
Well replace that with "Apache-facing Java", "Pure Java" (which buisness logic is), and "Oracle facing Java" and you've got a fair definition. While he could mean what it says, if you give him the benefit of the doubt then he is correct.
A poor WTF imho.
Admin
No, THERE ARE FOUR TIERS!!!
Sorry, had to do it.
DaleWill
Admin
Comments?
We don't need no stinkin' comments.
Admin
As a Java developer I can't help but feel ashamed.
When I was younger I used to honestly think that one of the advantages of Java is its relative complexity (as opposed to php), so it's almost impossible for a trained Java developer to be stupid. How stupid was I!
Admin
Admin
Some people will manage to fuck up an iron ball if you give them enough time.
Admin
ok but I find it hard to believe that their entire development staff "only" knew perl. How does one only know perl? To only know perl means you started your development learning with perl and only used perl after that? And to believe an entire development team was like this? If by team you mean one developer I would understand a little better but a whole team?
shenanigans. not the whole story just that the entire development team can only understand perl and that the entire applciation and all supporting applications was written in perl and this was suppose to be a viable company/product.
Admin
Ahem, three tears, was it?
Admin
Admin
It's funny and in a way sad how one turns from Asok into Dilbert and finally into Wally.
Admin
There's a big difference between "understanding" and "knowing." Half of the devs I work with "understand" Assembly, but I don't think you'd want to run any software we would write in asm ...
Admin
Dude, don't diss Jackson Pollock like that...
Admin
This is not a WTF. This is an OMG!
Captcha: whiskey - I'll bet the company owners needed lots of this too.
Admin
It's astonishing that 30 pages of code in a single method worked at all. Beyond the obvious ridiculousness of if such a long-running method, there is the issue that in Java you're allowed a maximum of 64K characters inside of a try/catch block.
Admin
That's right. Back in the day, you got hired just for knowing English. Then if you were ambitious, you'd learn to "code" by looking at whatever was being used at the dotcom where you worked. Then you'd jump in and make a few bug fixes on the production site. Then you're an expert. I bet "only knew perl" was being too generous, in reality those developers "only knew just barely enough perl to keep their current site running."
Admin
You're assuming he used try/catch.
Admin
Assuming you are right about the 64K code limit (that's about 1600-ish lines of code) in a Java try/catch block (I have no clue - never heard this before, not that I'd ever have any reason or desire to ever try it out), you are assuming that this guru actually used a try/catch construct. Anyone with that much code in one block likely doesn't think about the word error.
Admin
At least they had the decency to go belly up, and not leave this enterprisey application as a festering pile of legacy code to support.
Hey, I'm a glass half full guy ;-)
Admin
That kind of assumes, doesn't it, that the guy used try/catch blocks.
Admin
Java has checked exceptions that have to be caught or the code won't compile. Judging from the timeline, most exceptions were checked at this point. Any JDBC coding must be done in try catch blocks because SQLExceptions and subclasses are checked.
Admin
Admin
Just declare the exception to be thrown, and you are done with it.
Admin
Fair enough.
Question: I just jammed 65K of code into both a try AND catch block - compiles and runs. What exactly is this 64K limit?
Admin
This sounds kind of like my company. Except that our company doesn't have the abject failure in every corner that this company appeared to.
Admin
So?
...
try{db.execute("select...");}
catch(){}
...
Not to hard to catch those errors... :P
Admin
I'm a bit tired of you IT snobs ranking on Access developers. Some of us code carefully, use best practices, and produce well running applications that work well for the users.
Not every application has to be cutting edge, super tech and state of the art. Get a life and say something positive instead of making fun of something that isn't even relevant to this topic.
Admin
Your company has all the symptoms of a cluster fuck-up, but hasn't yeat crashed and burned? Can't help wondering what's down the road for you...
Admin
I'm detecting a bit of perl hate in this thread. *tear*
Admin
An older version limit perhaps?
captcha = quality. Ha!
Admin
"It was a work of art, in a Jackson Pollock sort of way."
That was worth the price of admission.
Admin
A much better explanation of Enterprisey Java:
"And again, the Java application is not something you just dump your code on. It's not a single servlet. It's a series of tiers. And if you don't understand those tiers can be layered and if they are layered, when you put your classes in, it gets on top and it's going to be crashed by anyone that puts into that tier enormous amount of code, enormous amounts of code."
Admin
The 64k rule is for entire methods. No method can be longer than 64k according to the JVM specs. (Even though code length is stored on 4 bytes in the class file.) However, it has nothing to do with try-catch.
Admin
It's not necessarily access developers that people are ranking on, but more Access itself as a product. It's fine for a small db that nobody cares about, but once it starts getting used in production, there is no excuse to go to something like SQL Express. (Which is free btw, while access is not).
Admin
Well, then please omit the comments about the sloping foreheads. Thank you.
Admin
Uh-oh, caveman angry!
Actually I do Access "dev" every now and then, so it's all in good fun. Let me try this again:
--
Visual FoxPro has a similar three-layer structure: a thick client, a thin database layer, and a very thick barrier preventing any FoxPro users from learning new technologies.
--
See, that was even easier!
Admin
Keep in mind that a standard 60-line page has about 4.4k characters per page maximum (74 wide x 60 rows = 4,440), including spaces, assuming no double-spacing on paragraphs, 12-point font, etc. Assuming some whitespace (lines that don't go all the way across the page, some paragraph indenting, etc.), and you end up with an average of 2k characters per page (I've actually worked in a typesetting office, and this is pretty usual for letter size paper). At 2k characters per page, 64k characters is 32 pages.
Admin
Not everything was designed and deployed yesterday. MS Access has been around for ages, and SQL Express has not. SQL Express may be free, but in a business environment where every user has all of the MS Office products installed on their machine by default, MS Access is configuration free - nobody has to think (even for a second) about deploying a MS Access project properly. If you have 5,6,7 year old MS Access databases being utilized by small workgroups, and it works fine, why would want to waste valuable development resources to switch over to SQL Express?
Admin
Well, our product is a java middleware, and it has basically 1 page. There are a few key differences.
1) Our middleware actually is a middleware.
2) We have a more effective method of determining what to show right now than ten thousand if then else statements
2a) We're "one page" in the sense that its not a single JSP page, but that our middleware accepts one particular URL (sans GET/POST bits).
3) Our company has been around for quite some time (think decades), and we seem to be doing pretty well. Trivial management annoyances aside, we all actually work pretty well.
4) We have quite a few clients, and they stick around. They like our product over those of our competators, as well as our willingness to do what's necessary to accomodate them.
Our stuff works, and it works well. The older, crustier bits of our software we're slowly rebuilding and phasing out with newer technologies. If you knew who we were, I'm pretty sure you wouldn't call us a WTF at all.
Admin
If true this smells of a compiler-specific limitation. There's no limitation like this in the language specification.
Admin
By the way, it's not characters of source but bytes of code. Big relief for those who have to use AccessibleTableModelChange.
Admin
SQL Express is basically a cut down of SQL Server 2005 (In the same way that MSDE was a cut down of SQL 2000)