Exactly this. At Abebooks[1], they had a Servlet called "AbeServlet" that was duplicated for every new page that needed behaviour. By the time I arrived there w

Exactly this. At Abebooks[1], they had a Servlet called "AbeServlet" that was duplicated for every new page that needed behaviour. By the time I arrived there were close to 200 different servlets all copied from the same "template". Eventually a new requirement came: we need to support i18n because of a merger with European counter-parts. French, British English, Spanish, and German. Hundreds of servlets had to change. Took about two weeks of coding by several developers. When I arrived, I created "AbeMetaServlet" (bad name, but good idea). All my servlets extended from it, as it contained common behaviour. To make my pages i18nized, I changed something like a dozen lines of code and was done in less than an hour--about 16 servlets, if I recall. I didn't know about the upcoming merger. I simply despise duplicating code. There was another example at that shop where they had processes that started up, ran to completion, then paused until time for the next run. All the batch processes had been copied from a template with no thought to the future. I was tasked with updating a batch job for associating pictures of book covers with inventory that vendors uploaded. Rather than copy/paste, I rolled my own and fixed a bug. (There wasn't any code that could be re-used, architecturally.) The bug added several hours of run time to the picture maintenance process. The first task each batch job performed was to fetch a list of 10,000 vendor names over an abysmally slow network drive. Undoubtedly this bug was copy/pasted into the other processes. I re-wrote the code to request the vendor names from the database--and only open up directories for valid vendors. The code, which originally ran in something like 12 hours, was reduced to 8 minutes. All the batch jobs likely suffered from this error. Including the one that took almost 24 hours to run. Anyone know what happens when a batch job needs more than 24 hours to finish? Anyway. Had a proper design been developed at the start, one simple change would have made all the batch processes faster. [1]: http://www.abebooks.com/ http://www.abebooks.com/