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• Enterprise software (Score:1)

  by mary.poppins (3530)

  Yeah, "enterprise software" is often of very poor quality, and designed poorly, because it is developed under tight deadlines. No time to think things through, just ship it!
  
  Compounding this problem is the turnover at proprietary software companies. The best way to get a raise is to switch jobs. The *only* way to avoid ever-increasing responsibilities is to switch jobs. As a result, people switch jobs frequently, and there is a constant refrain of "don't touch it, we don't really understand it any more".
  • Re:Enterprise software (Score:1)

    by perrin (4270) on 2005.09.26 18:30 (#43497) Journal

    The original version of Vignette was actually pretty interesting. It was not a CMS so much as a web development system created by some apache hackers at cnet.com. They hooked into the 404 handler to generate missing content on demand and then cache it so it could be served statically. A daemon process would clear out expired items. This is better than a pre-generation strategy (like Bricolage and Krang use) in some situations, especially when you have a large amount of content but only some of it gets looked at frequently. They provided an embedded Tcl interpreter and one of the more ambitious caching systems out there. It actually allowed for page components at a higher level to have a long expiration time but include sub-components with a short expiration, or user-specific content. Anyone familiar with Mason will tell you this is not easy to do well.
    
    Of course then they spun off this neat idea into a company, hired a marketing team, changed it into a Java thing, and charged millions of dollars for it. You'd have to be an idiot to buy Vignette these days, with all of the great open source CMS options avalable in a variety of languages.

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