Okay, I just realized I left a less-than-informative post there. So
here's the more detail.
I'm a Perl programmer, hired for this contract to do scripting within
the OAS LiveHTML Perl architecture, to glue various pieces of this
application together.
My beefs:
- Non-standard Perl. They have a short, virtually useless list of
non-standard features in the documentation (eg. "support for
performance instrumentation" -- that's it, no more detail). Various
Perl standard stuff like crypt() are gone with no explanation.
- Non-functional functionality. They give an example in the
documentation, which they actually have coded as an example app, which
is supposed to return a physical path from a virtual one. It simply does
not work. Does nothing whatsoever. Likewise the redirect() function
does nothing.
- Atrocious documentation. Two other pieces of functionality that
presumably work, but they don't give enough information: rolling your
own redirection via a status code and header information, and retrieving
information about an HTTP request. In the former case, the status code
seems to short-circuit the return of headers, but this is just a guess
since all I have to go on is the fact that it fails. In the latter case, the
function requires an HTTPRequestInfoType object, the nature of which
is left entirely up to the developer. (I'm really hoping that this is my
only legitimate beef, that everything actually does work and is
implemented, but they just forgot to mention it in the docs.)
- Total absence of debugging. The docs say that STDERR is routed to an
error file. By all appearances, STDERR goes to /dev/null. There does not
seem to be any documented way to log from a program. Errors are not logged,
and often an error results in a completely blank page being sent back to
the browser.
In short, this is *THE* worst development environment I've ever seen. I'm
still holding out hope that there's somebody out there who can make sense
of it, but as it stands now I have one more product I plan to avoid and
recommend against at every opportunity.
Anyone still here, thanks for listening to me rant.
Adam
Received on Mon Nov 08 1999 - 14:58:02 CST
