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Having worked with SS for a couple of months now building http://www.soneraplaza.nl I'm not really impressed with SS. My main problem is the API, everyting is eval-ed, so to get a " into a string when doing a set, you need to double escape it: \\". But when you use the SS IF or WHILE command, which asumes the contents of a command body to be text to be sent to the browser instead of it being a command and interprets only code between [] as a command, that also is eval-ed. So doing a set in the IF command body requires you to do \\\\"! You can imagine what a complex regexp might look like in SS...
If you set a variable in the global scope using [SET] and then setting that variable again in a procedure using the normal TCL set, the SS [SHOW] command (return "" if the variable doesn't exist, instead of an error) will keep returning the global one, not the local one.There are some things though that I do like:
- The DB driver (which P...
OK, Jeroen (above) and I work on the same site. And I have to say that if used correctly, StoryServer can do a lot of things and as said before, the "parameters" inside the URL is a really great thing, both for caching and search engines. SS5 also looks a lot better on paper that 4.2. There's just one thing that they haven't 'fixed' yet: connections to multiple databases. If you use Sybase for your SS db and want to connect to another Sybase db, it's painful (no connection pooling), but possible. Try to connect to Oracle or MS-SQL and things get real ugly. And although I agree with my colleague that it can handle the load, from an engineers point of view I just don't like doing it with so many machines behind a load balancer. Even though the cost of extra hardware is nothing compared to having a staff of 15+ on your payroll for the site plus an external design company. If only they fixed the database connections it may even become my system of choice for portal sites like ours. If...
Update to my rants above: OK, Vignette Sucks. They never improved anything much, except for a faster page generation in 5.0+. The Java extensions in 5.5 are just TclBlend and with the way Vignette page generators work a couple of JVMs are started on each server. A typical 2 CPU Sun box will run 16 of them at 50Mb each. Yes that is 750Mb (15x50) of wasted memory. Plus you cannot maintain state between two page requests, one of the great features of servlets. Java in 5.6 is just calling a 3rd party servlet engine (WebLogic/Tomcat/etc.) to do the hard work, although Vignette does pass the jsessionid this time. ASP seems to be really stupid as well. It just uses a second IIS instalation to do the work. They still don't do content management. Vignette Professional Services (their consultancy) are a bunch of wankers. On a previous project I supposedly had the top dogs from VPS in the UK. They can't code, don't know SQL or data modeling and they wouldn't recognize referentia...
Justin, on point 1 & 2: agreed. 3: CLOB/BLOBs are HARD. Try doing them in Oracle in JDBC, or even their own drivers in C, they are a pain in the butt, really. They work fine with ROW_INSERT/UPDATE, though I hate using those for other reasons. 4: I never do \\\\\\\\\\\\n to get a new line. I never use IF and FOREACH, that's why. Don't be put of by TCL just because Vignette's implementation sucks!
A big OOPS in ALL Vignette/Tcl versions, where the use of [NEEDS LOGIN] allows the execution of arbitrary code. You are vulnerable if you run a public website with that command on any page or have a development CDS (the template previewer has NEEDS LOGIN on top) reachable from the internet.See http://bas.scheffers.net/vgn-needs-login-exploit.html for a complete explaination.
In all their wisdom, Vignette says they will patch this in V6 (but not 5.0 or V/5). Ofcourse sending out a security alert to all their users is letting them know they stuffed up, so it doesn't seem like they will do that.
You will be surprised at the number of development CDSs accesable from the internet by using Google.And I suspect that is only the tip of the iceberg.
More like an advertisement than a review! But I guess that is fair enough, you have used it for a long time and a lot of frames so I assume you have good reason for such a glowing review. You haven't mentioned the 24-105/4L IS. In my mind this is what makes the 5D (or a cheaper FF camera a few years down the road) a worthy contender. After only 19 years of the EF mount, Canon finally decided to grace us with a quality standard zoom that doesn't break your back like the 24-70/2.8 does, woohoo! (now all it needs to do is come down in price and who needs IS anyway at these focal lengths if you can go to ISO 400 without any real loss of quality?) I do think Nikon deserves more credit than you give them. The general rule seems to be to compare the 5D to the D200. In that respect all reviews show they are on par in image quality with the Nikon having the upper hand in build quality and price. If you like your primes at their designed focal lengths and have cash to burn, the 5D seems ...
I think an RDBMS is perfect for smaller sites of up to a few thousand users. After that (when you start requiring clustering to support the load and/or storage requirements) it is probably much simpler to just use a big SAN storing Maildirs with as many IMAP and web front-end boxes as you need. But you would lose the nice advantages a pure SQL solution gives you, like precise sorting and (full text) search. As an alternative to all the Java-in-the-database stuff Jin was doing, you could simply write a tiny C program that sits in the .qmail file and POSTs the RFC822 data (and SMTP to/from/helo) to the webserver for instant processing. If it bombs out for whatever reason, qmail will just try again later. (Like Jin said in his article, that problem has been solved) I once envissioned a mailing list system that worked this way (all the current ones are so 1990) but never got a chance to implement it, like so many - in my mind - good ideas...
I am surprised about your negative views on the back seat of the R44; I don't think it is as bad as you describe at all. I have spent some time in the back and find it plenty comfortable enough for my 6'4", bulky frame. I'd be more than happy to spend an hour or two flying somewhere seated in the back. Most of my R44 time (probably 4 hours and counting) has been in the front-left seat. There one design flaw becomes painfully obvious: with the vent lever locked open, the little t-bar sticks out and pokes me in the leg when my feet on the pedals. (not that they ever are, of course; that would be illegal.) So leave it unlocked and re-open it every few minutes is the solution.
I recently created a client's website on App Engine (Java). It's worked out well. It's a very basic CMS for a boutique luxury holiday home agency. Not having SQL does make for the need to think outside of the box. But if you can do that, you have a free hosting service for a small dynamic website. The only reason I would hesitate to build my next big .com on it is that it is very hard to move away from should you want or need to. The lack of SQL skills frustrates me enormously. I see so many dead-slow designs relying on caching to have any performance at all, simply because to get an index of articles with author name, number of comments and the first image (if any) attached to the article, the average ivy-league CS grad wouldn't know what an outer join on a derived table was if it hit them in the face. Instead they do recursive queries or duplicate (de-normalize) data. There comes a point (Amazon, Facebook, eBay) when one big RDBMS doesn't make a whole lot of sense anymore as ...