December 04, 2007

Perl on Rails - Why the BBC Fails at the Internet The BBC’s infrastructure is shockingly outdated, having changed only by fractions over the past decade. Over-priced Sun Enterprise servers running Solaris and Apache provide the front-end layer. This is round-robin load balanced, there’s no management of session state, no load-based connection pool. The front-end servers proxy to the application layer, which is a handful of Solaris machines running Perl 5.6 - a language that was superseded with the release of Perl 5.8 over five and a half years ago.

Via Bifurcated Rivets

posted by Spock 16 years ago
  • ...cripes...
  • This kind of thing is all too common in the corporate world, and is generally symptomatic of companies that either don't realize the value of having their own accountable in-house IT staff, don't hire good people to run that staff, or else don't let technical people who know what's involved in deploying and managing web applications make the actual call in choosing a company to outsource to. I hear these kinds of stories all the time. There's one major tech shop that has offices here in town that processes all manner of loans. How major? If you have a mortgage in the US, it's very likely that it's gone through their system at some time or other. Some friends of mine used to work there, and would tell horror stories of where the bodies were buried in their code. Case in point: they run IBM mainframes and do most of their programming in COBOL, an aged but still very useful language. For a long time they managed their data in flat text files, but then realized they were losing business to other companies who were using modern relational databases. So their solution was to install DB2 on their mainframe and port the data from the flat files into the database tables. Problem was they didn't want to restructure their code to really make use of the new database (would have been a huge undertaking), so each table in their database has two fields per record. Field 1: the table name. Field 2: the full fixed-length record duplicated exactly from the original flat file. In other words, effectively nothing was changed other than wrapping their old data in a new package. They were still handling data in essentially the same way. The upside for their business was that they could now advertise to companies that they're running the most state-of-the-art DB2 database software you can get for IBM mainframes, so they sound like a cutting-edge code shop when they're really still stuck in the 1970s technologically. Companies would swallow their sales pitch, sign on, and then realize their mistake when they'd make a request for a query that should have taken hours to do and hear back from this tech shop that if they could do it at all, they'd need $100,000 to write the application to deliver the data that was requested.
  • Oh, and whoever's responsible for this decision: Yes, that’s right, Siemens forks Perl to remove features that their engineers don’t like. would now be selling pencils on the street, if there were any justice.
  • *inserts Techie Babel Fish* No, sorry, still nothing. Something about a pearl necklace?
  • mct: According to the comments, the accuracy of that statement is questionable.
  • Ah, yeah, I see that now. There's a response, too, but clearly it's more complex than was presented. I just generally skip comments sections on sites I don't know -- I pretty much expect they'll all be like YouTube: haha your running perl morans u shud be running visul j++ its da bomb get a clue steve jobs
  • Monkeyfilter: haha your running perl morans u shud be running visul j++ its da bomb get a clue steve jobs
  • haha your running perl morans u shud be running visul j++ its da bomb get a clue steve jobs I can't get that phrase out of my head. If I have time later, I may set it to music.
  • Just out of interest: Perl 5.6.2 : 2003-Nov-15 Perl 5.8.0 : 2002-Jul-18 I'm not sure how the BBC "fails" at the Internet. Sure, there are issues with its website, but it manages to rank consistently in the top 50 worldwide. I've never noticed downtime, and I probably check the site a few times a day. The problems caused by the sell-off/outsourcing of BBC Technology are more at the level of inhouse program-making than web stuff.
  • yes I've never noticed any issues with the BBC website which seems fast, stable and cleanly designed. I guess it just isn't cool on the inside.