OK, here is a severe misunderstanding brewing. I definitely did not mean SQLPage when I said one-off half-documented pseudo-framework. In fact, I did not mean

OK, here is a severe misunderstanding brewing. I definitely did not mean SQLPage when I said one-off half-documented pseudo-framework. In fact, I did not mean any real, standalone, named product with this. I do however see very much how you could think so from my description, so my apologies. What I meant: consider any random big software development. It might be mind-numbingly boring, very technically repetitive, you might have devs who never did any maintenance, or devs being expensive got the command to start building something anything while the business has yet to start delivering something resembling requirements. In this kind of case, programmers tend to start building abstractions based on their imagined needs, with an We-will-add-the-business-stuff-later attitude. The results are generally some kind of architecture astronaut horror. Abstraction will be very high, weird features and handling of useless corner cases will abound. In-code documentation, logging, debugging features will be absent. Higher level documentation was either not written or lost long ago. That's your average one-off half-documented pseudo-framework. I've seen plenty of these (and committed a few crimes of my own). From the top of my head, some of the worst: * A full-blown 3000 lines templating library, for rendering exactly 1 report that was basically a for loop dumping an sql query to a html file. * A C10K database connection manager built on top of apache commons pooling (which while a good library was not fit for this purpose at all), hyperoptimized for TCP port open/close speed, for an application making at most a few connections per minute. * A cache manager for files, deciding when to remove a file based on either AI or linear regression, with a web UI for configuring this decision and all the zillion config parameters and strategies, but the time to generate the cached data was shorter than the time to read it from disk and the files easily lived for months. * A java message building code that did everything humanly possible to only allocate a big buffer once at the beginning because 'GC is too slow', but the coder forgot how joining strings together created temporaries that were of course cleaned up by the GC. Needless to say, the people maintaining these beast cursed the devs who implemented them, and tended to rip them out on sight if possible, or pay the very heavy maintenance cost.