XML Scripting
I have been with my current employer for a few months now working on a software project that the owner of the company has a vested interest in with a vendor (he is on the company board). Our job was to take this product, which is a repository system, and add on a workflow piece for publishing.
Now, here is where it gets interesting… This vendor has one primary developer who is an XML expert. The repository code is written in Java and they use an XML scripting engine for all of their processing. So XML isn’t the best choice for this, but so far this isn’t too bad, right? I admit I have tried XML scripting in the past via Jelly and while it wasn’t the best thing, it wasn’t too bad. The app was small in nature and it ran reasonably well, but I wouldn’t do it again. The big difference between what I did and what these guys are doing is that I still kept my code separated. The scripts did the processing, JSP did the view rendering and Struts did the controlling. These guys have no concept of that whatsoever and as a result sometimes they have XSL sheets doing business logic, sometimes that have scripts that embed view logic with their business logic, sometimes it is partioned, etc. A total mess. To top it off, it runs horribly slow.
Back to our expert. Well, this ‘expert’ doesn’t know didly squat about object oriented programming and not much else about Java and he wrote the entire scripting engine and the repository implementation. There is one class in there that has more static methods that I written in my entire life, no shit. To top it off, the repository spits almost everything out as SAX events. Great if all you are doing is retrieving XML, but for everything else it sucks.
What is sad about the whole thing is that the owner of this vendor has our owner completely snowballed. Everything he says is taken for gold and this guy has even gotten several project managers fired here, always blaming them instead of their software.
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[...] In my continuing saga on my new favorite vendor… [...]