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"Redevelop the old system in modern open source tech" is a tough sell when so many of these airlines are differentiating on technology. Myself and many other fr

"Redevelop the old system in modern open source tech" is a tough sell when so many of these airlines are differentiating on technology. Myself and many other frequent fliers will not engage with companies with poor functionality and bad UX. We move or stay loyal when airline tech allows us to do & see most of the things we need.

gjjrfcbugxbhf 9y ago
They can build a open-source back-end and differentiate in the front end. Or even build common components/ technologies together and then build their back-ends on top - that is basically what the rest of us are doing...
- deleted 9y ago
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mbaha 9y ago
Their tech is not open enough to even allow for proper innovation and differentiation. That's the main issue with legacy IT. When you live in a world w/ Docker, REST (and every other open tech there is), you can build systems which are way more innovative.
- gaius 9y ago
  When you live in a world w/ Docker, REST (and every other open tech there is), you can build systems which are way more innovative That's quite funny because Docker and REST are just half-arsed reinventions of mainframe features from the 1970s.
  - mbaha 9y ago
    I completely get where you're coming from, but you also have to acknowledge for example that Docker is open source. That's not a trivial add-on to IBM mainframes, it provides every developer (w/ minimal resources e.g a laptop or free tier cloud service) the ability to run production-like environments. Sometimes, we take that for granted, but having worked for an airline IT, I noticed the bottleneck didn't come from hard algorithmic issues (most advanced route features were very basic to implement), but from the huge leap between production and dev environments: this was not Ubuntu on a server VS a MacOS on a laptop (manageable...), this was Ubuntu VMs (so should be close to prod?) vs cryptic data center clusters that had impossible-to-replicate features. As for REST, airline IT use an outdated messaging mechanism. It implements versioning and grammar, so should be clean and nice to work with? Not really... The messages were impossible to read for an inexperienced dev (opposed to XML or JSON). I heard plans to put JSON blobs in one of the fields of the messaging mechanism (completely destroying the value of versionning and grammar btw). That was not necessarily a bad idea, just a reaction to the lack of supported tooling, and readability for an obscure messaging mechanism. Again, I get where you're coming from, but I'm just allergic to nostagia for the sake of nostalgia where the old features clearly lacked essential features for 2017.

gjjrfcbugxbhf 9y ago

They can build a open-source back-end and differentiate in the front end. Or even build common components/ technologies together and then build their back-ends on top - that is basically what the rest of us are doing...

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

mbaha 9y ago

Their tech is not open enough to even allow for proper innovation and differentiation. That's the main issue with legacy IT. When you live in a world w/ Docker, REST (and every other open tech there is), you can build systems which are way more innovative.

gaius 9y ago
When you live in a world w/ Docker, REST (and every other open tech there is), you can build systems which are way more innovative That's quite funny because Docker and REST are just half-arsed reinventions of mainframe features from the 1970s.
- mbaha 9y ago
  I completely get where you're coming from, but you also have to acknowledge for example that Docker is open source. That's not a trivial add-on to IBM mainframes, it provides every developer (w/ minimal resources e.g a laptop or free tier cloud service) the ability to run production-like environments. Sometimes, we take that for granted, but having worked for an airline IT, I noticed the bottleneck didn't come from hard algorithmic issues (most advanced route features were very basic to implement), but from the huge leap between production and dev environments: this was not Ubuntu on a server VS a MacOS on a laptop (manageable...), this was Ubuntu VMs (so should be close to prod?) vs cryptic data center clusters that had impossible-to-replicate features. As for REST, airline IT use an outdated messaging mechanism. It implements versioning and grammar, so should be clean and nice to work with? Not really... The messages were impossible to read for an inexperienced dev (opposed to XML or JSON). I heard plans to put JSON blobs in one of the fields of the messaging mechanism (completely destroying the value of versionning and grammar btw). That was not necessarily a bad idea, just a reaction to the lack of supported tooling, and readability for an obscure messaging mechanism. Again, I get where you're coming from, but I'm just allergic to nostagia for the sake of nostalgia where the old features clearly lacked essential features for 2017.