Comments on Stan's Space: Mired in quicksand

Nice redesign, btw. Green is good. :-)

2007-07-16T22:45:00.000-04:00

Nice redesign, btw. Green is good. :-)

I tried that particular generousity tack, Rob, but...

2007-07-02T21:42:00.000-04:00

I tried that particular generousity tack, Rob, but after a while it just stopped making sense. It's sort of like wrapping LotusScript in LotusScript in order to isolate your code from changes to the LotusScript language.

In any case, the new verson will have a set of classes implementing a common interface, making db choice easier (mySQL is the wild card in this game -- there's no guarantee that it will remain free as in beer much longer, and ISPs may begin to drop it as a standard feature).

Hrm. At the risk of giving too much credit, is th...

2007-07-02T20:54:00.000-04:00

Hrm. At the risk of giving too much credit, is there any chance they were trying to insulate an API-like interface of their own from possible changes to the vendor's API? I've seen that done before, but only in a case where there were an awful lot of moving parts and most of them weren't under the dev's control. Oh, and the dev was paranoid about one particular thing.

The premise was that the vendor could change the names of their functions (and the parameters as well) without affecting most of the other moving parts. I thought it was juuuust a bit much (not to mention of questionable utility even granted the premise), but apparently it was a case of "twice burned forever shy" with this particular developer - after a couple of bona fide disasters, he insisted on doing this to every system he worked on.

Probably giving way too much credit, but as you know my philosophy on another person's code is always to assume there was a reason at the time. Not always a *good* reason, of course. :D