I just wrote up a brief piece about Bricolage and one of our competitors, Vignette. Despite all of the praise Bricolage has been winning and the large corporations who are choosing us over competitors, we're still not satisfied. In fact, because our customers want it, we now provide templating in PHP. You can embed PHP in Perl and it works just fine. Of course, it's on the CPAN.
Enterprise software
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". Combined with low code quality caused by deadline pressure, this results in the
"lava flow" antipattern.
Re:Enterprise software
perrin on 2005-09-26T23:30:46
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.
Storyserver *twitch*
schwern on 2005-09-27T07:35:35
Storyserver was my introduction to CMS back in 1997. It used TCL *gag* 7.2 when 8 was long since available. All templates were stored in the database (if anyone suggests large blocks of human editable text should live in an SQL database, shoot them.) Templates had no symbolic names, you had to refer to them by numeric ID. This lead to cryptic statements like "include 2938" and you just had to remember that template 2938 is your top menu bar.
Templates had to be edited through a special Java editor that only ran on Solaris and Windows and had a different code base for each (so much for write once, run anywhere). It make Notepad look good. Its syntax highlighting could only identify only two things "this is TCL, this is not TCL". You could not cut & paste from any other application into the editor.
Of course it cost an outragous amount of money and we were stuck with it.
At a certain point I simply refused to work on Storyserver documents. I'm sure this is one of the many reasons why I got fired.
