Classic ASP, Oh How I Miss You

Yeah, I lied.

I have had to do some work on a shopping cart that was originally written in ASP and it has reminded me why I enjoy not writing ASP. Last time I wrote ASP was in early 2003, but at least my code was well organized. I had includes in a central location, I was using VB ActiveX components to handle some of the site features and I was well to put it bluntly not so full of myself that I didn’t do research on improving my code.

The programmer who wrote this, I know of through a friend, and while I have not talked to him more than a few times I know through my friend that people have been very unhappy with his code. The last company I know of that experienced this he had some deal with, and cashed out of the deal because even he admitted the application bogged down the servers horribly. The server it was running on has 6gb of RAM and isn’t some old junker. It is also running Windows 2003 x64, and SQL Server 2005, which should help performance. The company that paid him to originally write the code has since hired another company to rewrite it so that the client is getting what they pay for when they resell the product.

Anyway, this cart was originally another ASP shopping cart and was stripped of a lot of the identifying details, which he then made into what was supposed to be some sort of “template” setup. I can really say though that it has been one of the more aggravating edits I have had to do, things are just all over the place in the code. Normally a template system allows you to make some visual changes without having to do a huge amount of editing. Take Wordpress for example, you know what pages to edit and what tags to add and you put them where you want the information to be displayed. Shopping carts are of course more complicated, but osCommerce uses templates and from what I’ve seen it is much easier. Templates are also used so the designers can stay out of the logic as much as possible since that is not what they do, with this setup there is logic all over the place. A number of files only have a line or two in them and the only one that means anything is the include line referencing a file with the exact same name in another directory.

I am really not big on putting down other programmers because I know for a fact there is code I have written that has not been worthy of any praise, but I also don’t regard myself as a top notch programmer like he does. When someone speaks about them self like they are top dog, they are just asking for it. There is also a difference between selling yourself and going overboard. It is just part of sales to make yourself sound like you are the only one for the job and if they decide not to go with you then it is their loss, in some cases you are and in some cases you aren’t. When I received the job for the FTA I was told from the start that it was in Joomla and I immediately looked at the code. Knowing I couldn’t fake knowing Joomla I said flat out that I had never worked with Joomla, but I have experience writing readable and well thought out code. Now the designer who did the template told them that he had worked with Joomla and la di da, but when I received his template he had hard coded things in that should have been dynamic, which of course would keep the end client from being able to edit them.

This post is getting a little bitchy now, but it is surprising just how many people go around making themselves into something they aren’t and making a lot of money doing it. This of course is nothing new as I am sure a lot of you have seen the posts discussing the tests that companies are giving during interviews and finding out that the programmers cannot solve basic problems. If you haven’t read the article do a Google search for FizzBuzz.

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