Menu
The previous programmer left the website in pretty unusable state, and I am having difficulty modifying anything. I am new to web design so I don't know whether my skills are a mismatch to this kind of job or is it normal in the real industry to have websites like these
<head>, and also call other common javascript functions (using <script src=..>
document.all - in fact the elements are referred or accessed by document.all only.<div>, <td> and every other element has an id, and these id's are manipulated by the javascript functions, and then some appropriate web service and the xslt files are loaded based on these.. T-SQL's for xml auto for most of the data that is returned by the web service - is it a good choice from the security standpoint to expose the table names and column names to the end user??I am a lot confused about the state of the application itself. Should I learn about the intricacies that he has developed and continue working on it, or should I start rewriting everything? What I am perplexed a lot is the lack of alternatives - and whether this is the common way web projects are handled in the real world or was it an exception?
Any suggestions, any pointers are welcome. Thanks
824
Reduced Speed – It's likely that a web app will operate at a slightly slower speed than one hosted on a server locally. Browser Support – Unfortunately, we don't all use the same browser. This means during development you'll need to ensure your app is supported across a variety of browsers.
Some of the performance issues are Poorly written code, Un-Optimized Databases, Unmanaged Growth of data, Traffic spikes, Poor load distribution, Default configuration, Troublesome third party services, etc.
Common web application performance issues include slow servers, poorly written code, traffic spikes and weak HTML tags. Some of the solutions to these problems are free, online tools such as Google Analytics, while others are issues with the code that may require more time and money.
No, it is not acceptable in this industry that people keep writing un-maintainable code.
My advice to you is to go up the chain and convince everyone that this needs to be rewritten. If they question you, find an external consultant with relevant web development skills to review the application (for 1 day).
Keeping this website as-is, because it 'works' is like keeping a working model Ford-T car on today's highways, very dangerous. Security and maintenance costs are likely the most persuading topics to convince anyone against keeping this site 'as-is'.
Next, get yourself trained, it will pay off if you can rewrite this application knowing the basics. Todays technology (asp.net MVC) allows you to implement core business value faster than trying to maintain this unconventionally written app.
77
Tough spot for an inexperienced developer (or any) to be left in. I think you have a few hard weeks a head of you where you really need to read up on the technologies involved to get a better understanding of them and what is best practice. You will also need to really dig down into the existing code to understand how it all hangs together.
When you done all that you really need to think about your options. Usually re-writing something from scratch (especially if it actually works) is a bad idea. This obviously depend on the size of the project, for a smaller projects with only a couple of thousand lines of code it might be OK. When looking at someone elses code it is also easy to overlook that all that weird shit going on could actually be fixes for valid requirements. Things often start out looking neat, but then the real words comes visiting.
You will need to present the business with time estimates for re-writing to see if that is an option at all, but I'm guessing you will need to accept the way things are and do your best with what you have. Maybe you could gradually improves things.
34
If you love us? You can donate to us via Paypal or buy me a coffee so we can maintain and grow! Thank you!
Donate Us With
