http://qs321.pair.com?node_id=202848


in reply to Loyalty, Personal gain or Professional Integrity

Mid 2001 I was faced with a challenge of refactoring our product for our next release and there were several issues that made it even more challenging. So even though our product since 1999 had been Perl based, and my preference was Perl, it was determined that moving to Java made more sense. The results were even better then I had expected. Two months of design and then an alpha release one month after that.

The original product consisted of over 350 Perl scripts, some embedded in Apache::ASP pages and others stand alone modules along with 47 database tables.

However, that project would not have been a success or as fast to alpha had it not been for the Perl version which taught us many things about how the product needed to be structured and a base from which to re-engineer the Java solution from.

In the end I was pleased with the Java work that was done. While at first I was apprehensive about the move because my lack of knowledge in Java, I found that it allowed me to look at the project from a different aspect since I was no longer as concerned with coding technique, but rather the final process of using the application and finding out if it worked correctly. I didn't realize until that move to another language how anal I was about the way something was coded, which can be good, but not when it keeps an item from getting to production on something that in the grand scheme of things simply needs to work not necessarily be pristine code (sad but true when the main goal is make money).

I did learn one other valuable less, nothing is easy in Java, Perl spoils a programmer with its data structure creation and manipulation.