Re: New Technoligy with Jet engine (terminal service and MDB)
- From: "David W. Fenton" <XXXusenet@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 02 Jul 2006 15:57:46 -0500
"cityrock" <ilaygur@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in
news:1151858798.855087.15450@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx:
So I am at a point, before I upgrade my system, have decided to
spend the next half year rewritting from scratch my back end and
front ends.
That decision sounds phenomenally stupid to me. See:
Things You Should Never Do, Part I
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html
Netscape 6.0 is finally going into its first public beta. There
never was a version 5.0. The last major release, version 4.0,
was released almost three years ago. Three years is an awfully
long time in the Internet world. During this time, Netscape sat
by, helplessly, as their market share plummeted.
It's a bit smarmy of me to criticize them for waiting so long
between releases. They didn't do it on purpose, now, did they?
Well, yes. They did. They did it by making the single worst
strategic mistake that any software company can make:
They decided to rewrite the code from scratch.
Read the whole article -- makes a *very* compelling case for never
starting over entirely.
I work on the principle of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." So,
I'd never touch working code or a working schema.
That's not to say I don't revise old apps. I sometimes will refactor
the code or replace old components with new versions that work
exactly the same way in order to lay the groundwork for future
enhancements. But it's only when the old version can't support the
enhancement, or when there is something broken in the old that I'd
do any of these things.
Moving from 20 to 60 simultaneous users is exactly the kind of thing
that is a valid reason for moving to a server back end. But the
first thing you should do is try doing the upsizing and see how many
things just work correctly without change. Then alter the individual
areas that *don't* work. If you had a well-designed Jet app, it's
likely to work pretty darned well with SQL Server, too.
My advice is to make only the changes that are necessitated by the
upsizing to a server back end. Then, for any parts of the app you're
dissatisfied with (for whatever reason), first refactor them to
bring them up to your current code standards, and only then
implement a new design that supports the new features. The principle
here is that any stage of the process, after the refactoring, after
the implementation of the initial redesign, you still have a working
application.
Trying to do it all at once will result in a Netscape-type situation
where you are 90% finished, but always 90% away from a working
application.
--
David W. Fenton http://www.dfenton.com/
usenet at dfenton dot com http://www.dfenton.com/DFA/
.
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- New Technoligy with Jet engine (terminal service and MDB)
- From: cityrock
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