Vent: If you ever get the chance to convert a site technology...

Take a job driving bagel truck in Baghdad instead.

Yeah I know 99% of the people who will read this will just stare slack jawed at it. But I gotta vent.

I have written nearly 10,000 lines of code to convert a site from PHP and MySQL to ASP and MSSQL. Just this week alone. I am not even done with the first page. It is a HUGE job tracking system that was written by a bunch of HACKS. FYI making a call to a database 200+ times to make a page is BAD BAD BAD.

Brain hurtz, must kill again.

I turned 200 SQL select statements into 5 stored procedures.

And I am not doing this because I am some MS nazi. I am doing it because I am the only PHP person here. Me supporting about 30 users of this thing. So if I convert, there are four people that can support it.

That and these pages are so poorly written that it will be a lot faster to make changes.

These guys would store every ounce of text in a javascript trigger. That, is not bad in and of itself. However let's say this post was stored in there (they seriously did this). See the problem yet? You don't? You can't?

Oh. Well, let me explain it this way. Javascript has a certain character it uses for marking off what is text. It is an apostophe. <indecipherable scream>

So that meant every time a user put in something like

"Don't use current box text. Get the one in Gail's office for reference."

The job would break. HARD. It see the word Don and a bunch of crap. That one was actually in there.

My approach, ie what I will call the right way, was to just leave the damn thing in the form object. Let someone make the changes to it and send it back to the database. Hell, it is not only idiot proof, it prevents people from hacking it with the freaking '1=1' hack.

Maybe in two more weeks of hard core coding I can be done.

 

Nope. However I did pick up a mysql to mssql converter that did what I needed. That was the easy part.

These guys used a LOT of enum fields for no good reason. So they might have a drop down menu with 15 items in it that fed from it. MSSQL doesn't support enum's so that comes over blank. Then I have to create a look up table from scratch to cover that base.

On top of that I can't change the data at all. Because if I do then when this thing goes live it will be a nightmare to sync up my test/dev version with the live.

Instead I am leaving the data alone so that it can be brought over to my system in like 20 minutes.

There is a lot of bad history with this thing. The manager that went outside the company to get it built was fired for going around our IS department. Plus he paid for it by making multiple payments that were $1 less than his maximum allowed. We suspect he got a kick back on top of that. Plus these were guys from his gaming clan with zero experience in building this kind of thing.

On top of that since this thing would hold proprietary and REALLY sensitive company info, they were hosting it on their UT2K server. This thing would have taken me 10 minutes to hack.