Re: Design Strategy WAS: High-Profile Advocacy Opportunity:VbulletinForum

Oops! josh@agliodbs.com (Josh Berkus) was seen spray-painting on a wall:
> Christopher,
>> Well, SAP has pretty consistently tried to apply this strategy to
>> their R/3 application, which is _not_ a "limited class of web
>> applications."
>
> Aha.  The key word there is "suitable".  I've supported some
> SAP-type applications, and they are messes of spaghetti code that
> underperform their hardware by a factor of 10.  As well as having
> chronic data integrity problems that pretty much require an on-staff
> application expert just to keep the thing running.

There's a few of us around that have been "certified," once upon a
time, and I doubt many would argue that R/3 is based on an ideal
design.

But the fact is that F500 companies decided to go with it.

By the way, the way that they avoid "chronic data integrity problems"
is by actively deprecating direct access to the data.

Automated data input is handled via something akin to programming CGI;
the CGI-like scheme runs data through the same screen-oriented logic
used to validate data entered interactively.  Efficiency is pretty
horrible, but there are some elegant aspects to it; if
automatically-entered data is _nearly_ right, the borken transactions
can be kept on record, and a user can walk them through online,
perhaps to fix some minor problems.  There are things they do that
_are_ worth emulating...

> So I find SAP an excellent example of how *not* to write an
> application, unless your goal is to maximize your support revenue.

It is essentially what you get if you write a way-sophisticated ERP
system with lowest-common-denominator functionality that amounts to
about what MySQL offers (modulo "transaction" support).

Yes, it requires a huge phalanx of developers and administrators.
Yes, it's highly vulnerable to data corruption unless you apply pretty
draconian system management policies.  And remarkably enough, contrary
to some vendors' marketing spiels, performance sucks remarkably badly.

The point still remains that it _is_ there, quite dominant in the ERP
market...
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