Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: Re: Re: Peppier

Author:jhebert@cmc.net
Posted:10/7/1998; 11:10:04 AM
Topic:Suggestion: Explore the Calendar
Msg #:128 (In response to 121)
Prev/Next:127 / 129

Dave,

You missed half of the original message.

You point out that unlike previous bbs systems written in Frontier, this had membership baked in in a clean way. You also point out that it is all dynamically rendered.

I originally pointed to Samizdat (though I admit I am thinking more of "Samizdat a la UHCS" which I wrote for the FSU Freshman Writing, Internet section) as a system which had membership baked in (original samizdat), allowed you to change things easily at a high level through editing the text chunks that went into making the pages (original samizdat), did it all WITHOUT ANY caching (original samizdat, I added caching because my 6100 with 16 megs of ram died when 30 students all loaded the page at the same time), allowed students to do peer reviews of others work (my version it certainly wasn't much different than the simple in-reply-to threading you have here), allowed posters to revise their works (my version), delete things (my version) and more.

I don't know how long the original Samizdat took to write, but I'll wager it was less time than the underlying new framework in frontier 5. That's a fair comparison, right? And my mods took 1 night, then a return visit for about 2 hours to shore up the caching after a live-fire test. So probably less time overall went into Samizdat than went into the new system, it showed the same power with the same high level ease of use as the new system, it had about the same level of sensitivity to high-traffic (your system handles more in real terms because of all the ram and cpu you have behind it -- I'd like to see how it performs on that old 6100).

So, to repeat my original query, why all the wide-eyed gushing about features which are not new, and gushing about power which you are forced to admit in your message (121) that is only "power" for people in small workgroup situations.

You are constantly thrusting your product into the same spotlight given to products such as Vignette, and I can't understand it when you are forced to provide caveats like "don't expect to be able to run news.com off of it yet, it'll fall over."

And, also, what does the fact that "this is not implemented in CGI scripts" have to do with it? That just makes it look worse -- if I compiled the sources for mysql and apache and perl all togehter in a big lump I would expect that removing all the interprocess overhead would make it go FASTER, so pointing out that this isn't done with CGI's (neither is slashdot btw) doesn't make much sense to me.

A system like you've got is, on paper, a good idea. The implementation simply is unimpressive and will continue to be so for as long as you expect us to get excited about what the fastest dell PII on the earth can do for "small workgroups."

jim

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