Today, we had a Bob The Builder day: Can We Fix It? Yeah!
We were at a customer's site trying to solve some encoding issues they had with some very strange combo of JNI-called native Windows DLLs, a huge collection of mainframe-generated Beans and JSPs, some closed-source controller servlet and Cocoon used purely as a PDF rendering engine. Driving back, we were amazed about the fact this all worked, and reasonably well too. Reading back Wiki's comment on my code generation rant, I'm starting to see where big blue companies (amongst others) are able to sell obscure integration and generation wear. I'm also starting to understand how these architectures scale: throwing lots and lots of big iron at it. Bah. Still, I can understand those developers are delighted to see effective reuse of their many hundreds of thousands of lines of mainframe code, neatly packaged and deployed on a laptop inside Tomcat.
It shows that we have children of similar age 8-)
I've always been wondering what Bob's crew says in
the English language version - I do know the German
one due to my five year old son.
"Können wir das schaffen? Yo, wir schaffen das!"