The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

An Attempt at Proper JSP

by snoofle in CodeSOD on 2014-08-25

When developers first got access to those new-fangled gadgets called computers, memory was a very precious resource. Applications were frequently written as a main controller that would load module overlays into memory, call a function, and then repeat as additional functions were called. It was a horrible way to code, but it was all we had. Unfortunately, as computers came equipped with more and more RAM, this habit of repeating the controller code in every file seems to be quite resilient...

Fast forward several decades, and Jeremy, like the rest of us at some point, was a newbie at his first position as a developer. The application that he was tasked with maintaining had been written by an engineer whose training apparently included learning basic JSP control-structures, and how to perform cut-n-pasting of code from A to B.

27 comments - Last comment @ 2014-08-26

Inheritance

by snoofle in Feature Articles on 2014-08-19

In life, you will inherit all sorts of things: traits from your direct ancestors, knick-knacks from relatives you tolerated, and sometimes, even money! Of course, there are other things in life that you inherit that you might not even want. The gene for some debilitating disease. The urn filled with the ashes of a relative you particularly despised. Code.

Gerhardt was employed at a C++ shop. Their main product used a third party library. Perhaps used is not quite right; abused is more apt. Every single field that was public (whether it looked like it should be public or not) was ab/used to the max.

70 comments - Last comment @ 2014-10-11

Securing Input

by snoofle in CodeSOD on 2014-08-14

We all know that many developers have difficulty in dealing with built-in concepts like dates and times, and that for and switch statements don't necessarily have to be used with each other. However, validating a piece of input is usually more straightforward. You compare what you got to what was expected.

Mathieu was tasked with migrating some Groovy scripts. While the technical migration was fairly easy, he found it necessary to rewrite certain portions of the input validation routines. For example, the task of validating the month portion of a date string seemed straightforward enough...

44 comments - Last comment @ 2014-08-18

The Thread Mismanager

by snoofle in CodeSOD on 2014-08-04

We've all heard of threads. No, not the stuff hanging loosely from your clothes. I mean threads, as in multitasking. Most modern languages have all sorts of nifty facilities that allow you to create, manipulate and destroy them at will and with minimal effort. There are even abstractions that will manage a set of threads for you, so that you can spawn a bunch of tasks, and let them tell you when they're done. You can synchronize them yourself. You can put up cyclic barriers to make them all wait at a specific point in the code. You can make them return a value when they're done. Or you can just spawn them and let them run all by their lonesome. Of course, not everyone trusts the built-in facilities... Now you might expect this sort of thing from Joe Offshore, but not from certain huge, blue companies.

Baron inherited something written by such a huge, blue company. Basically, it monitors a database, does some work for each changed record and then deletes the record from the database. Unfortunately, this little beast suffers from horrific performance problems and requires frequent server reboots to get things running again.

58 comments - Last comment @ 2014-08-23