4 ms·

Then you would love the systems I refer to! You'll have plenty of fun with 500-900ms delay added by a crappy Java front-end and even if it's on the shorter end

Then you would love the systems I refer to! You'll have plenty of fun with 500-900ms delay added by a crappy Java front-end and even if it's on the shorter end consistently you'll love the odd 900ms bump for the screen scraper refresh making you hit twice since the crappy rubber dome keyboard doesn't register way too often. Then back to tabbing through 20 fields until you stop at the right one again! We're not talking quick modern UIs here, but screen capturing an old virtual terminal window hosted at headquarters, with OCR and color matching, all developed by some consultancy who went bankrupt in 2000, and because of how much depends on the legacy system noone dares to fix what's technically working. It's a humbling environment to end up in as a young dev for sure. You'll be very disappointed that one guy in 1999 didn't think reversing would be needed.

raverbashing 5y ago
Yeah. I see, but from a point this sounds like a bunch of excuses If I can book it through the web (hence, they have a web frontend) they could have though of something better in the last 10 years Or, you know. Make shift-tab work. And use a faster terminal emulator
- tapland 5y ago
  It's all about pretty short term returns of course. You can build a web interface separately (external contract ofc) and that will work in parallell, but aside from very basic services there are tons of edge cases, bad documentation, business customers with systems built with yours as a dependency. It's a little like any bank old enough still having paper file storage and the planned end of life is the literal death of all paper holding customers. So the old system sticks around and as long as it does noone wants to buy a new set of computers to run in parallell with the old ones. There are companies who try hard and end up sinking hundreds of millions of dollars into replacing old systems that only cost a server blade, ten devs and five people in operations to run. With no clear benefit visible to the shareholders far from all of them have even started that move.
garaetjjte 5y ago
>but screen capturing an old virtual terminal window hosted at headquarters, with OCR and color matching Uh, but why? If there's old virtual terminal just connect to it with SSH, why bother with screen scraping that only makes it worse?

raverbashing 5y ago

Yeah. I see, but from a point this sounds like a bunch of excuses If I can book it through the web (hence, they have a web frontend) they could have though of something better in the last 10 years Or, you know. Make shift-tab work. And use a faster terminal emulator

tapland 5y ago
It's all about pretty short term returns of course. You can build a web interface separately (external contract ofc) and that will work in parallell, but aside from very basic services there are tons of edge cases, bad documentation, business customers with systems built with yours as a dependency. It's a little like any bank old enough still having paper file storage and the planned end of life is the literal death of all paper holding customers. So the old system sticks around and as long as it does noone wants to buy a new set of computers to run in parallell with the old ones. There are companies who try hard and end up sinking hundreds of millions of dollars into replacing old systems that only cost a server blade, ten devs and five people in operations to run. With no clear benefit visible to the shareholders far from all of them have even started that move.

garaetjjte 5y ago

>but screen capturing an old virtual terminal window hosted at headquarters, with OCR and color matching Uh, but why? If there's old virtual terminal just connect to it with SSH, why bother with screen scraping that only makes it worse?