| |
Why this page |
|
| |
For the
past 3 years, I've had various clients that used Broadvision
for their application server. And, in each case, Broadvision was a
nightmare to deal with. The people who sell Broadvision know this,
so what they do is head straight to the people with money but no tech
savvy on the client side, and mesmerize them with tales of "One
To One Marketing" and the people with money fork it over without
bothering to learn that the system is bloated, slow, and pathetic.
I'm compiling a list of reasons why Broadvision sucks. If you know
of reasons I haven't listed, please send
them in. |
|
|
|
December 3, 1999
An engineer who worked on homedepot.com sent this point-by-point
reply to Maria Tapia's email, confirming
that, well, Broadvision sucks.
November 26, 1999
There's been a recent blip of interest in this page.
A reader forwarded me an email
written by BroadVision Sales Engineer Maria Tapia. It addresses, point-by-point,
the issues discussed in the July 29 post below. It's rather lengthy, so
I'm placing it on a separate page, with
my own comments.
Philip
Greenspun, author of Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing, and
a man who knows more about developing Web applications than anyone else
on earth, wrote me:
I'm linking to your
bvsucks page from
http://photo.net/wtr/thebook/
(the community chapter)
In a similar vein,
you might enjoy
http://photo.net/wtr/application-servers.html
and
http://photo.net/wtr/vignette-old.html
Regards,
Philip.
Then there was this note from
Kenchok Tensing:
Hi Peter
Thanks for the 'BroadVision Sucks'
pages.
Another reason that BV sucks is
that using Java classes is so
inconvenient as to be almost
impossible.
To access a Java package BV *recommend*
the following
:-
1. Create a CORBA server in Java
that calls the methods in your
package. This involves writing
a bunch of IDL.
2. Create BV components in C++
that talk to your CORBA server
via BV's (Orbix) CORBA ORB.
This involves writing a bunch of
not-quite-IDL in BV's 'jsi' files.
3. In addition a serious amount
of C++ is needed.
4. Don't forget to turn on parallel
execution mode in *each and
every one* of your C++ CORBA
calls or your application is single
threaded through the CORBA ORB
:-(
5. Write some JavaScript that
accesses your new components.
6. Wait while JavaScript data
structures get converted to BV
then to C++ then over the wire to
CORBA then to the ORB then to your
Java CORBA server then deserialised
as Java then converted to the
correct types for the Java method
you *really* want to use ... and
the same thing in the other direction.
It ain't fast and it ain't pretty.
But the Good News!
Having seen this horribleness we
decided it would be much more
sensible to enable BV to call
Java directly. Essentially I ported
the Mozilla version of LiveConnect
to run in the somewhat uncooperative
environment of the BV server. This
was one of the more challenging
ports I've completed given the lack
of source code and technical
information from BroadVision.
Anyway, the upshot of this is that
now it's very easy to call Java
methods from BV template pages.
e.g.
var thing = new java.lang.String("Hello")
<% thing %>
var foo = new Packages.MyPackage.Wibble(...)
wibble.doMyMethod(foo)
...
The entire implementation is
contained in a single shared
object file to be installed in
a BroadVision components
directory. We're running our
customers web site with this
stuff with no problems.
More information, the source code
and a precompiled binary for
Solaris are available for no
charge by sending an email
to kunchok_tensing@yahoo.co.uk.
I have called this software
Myopia.
Yours in the fight for open
source.
Kunchok
August 11, 1999 Update
This series
of posts on Yahoo!'s message boards explains why you can't bookmark
Broadvision pages, due to a grossly inadequate design flaw.
July 29, 1999
My original list:
|