Darren New wrote:
> Many are, usually in the initial phases when they really need the most 
> help to get going. 

Incidentally, I might see this more than you do, depending on how you do 
your development stuff. The sorts of projects I work on usually involve 
mash-ups of half a dozen different functionalities.

For example, the thing I did most recently (www.poundsky.com), we have 
direct relationships with some 15 different suppliers, as well as 
needing to meet the criteria of all our suppliers' suppliers. (I.e., we 
not only have to work with the supplier, but what that supplier is 
providing to us is access to *their* partners, who we also have to 
satisfy. E.g., we not only have to fetch ads from the ad servers, we 
have to only put the appropriate ads on the right pages.)

MG uses WebSphere, which is well-documented in an IBM Mainframe sort of 
way - heaven help you if actually want to use it from a language other 
than COBOL. (Heaven help you if you don't know COBOL, for that matter.)

STI uses SOAP libraries that are so poorly written they don't even talk 
to other SOAP libraries, let alone export WSDL. And whatever XML parser 
they mashed up for the other part doesn't quote strings right, so you 
can't read it with a standard XML parser.

Every feed we get has a different format, none of which is documented. 
So if I can drag out whether it's TCP or UDP they're sending, the next 
step is to log all the bytes that come in and try to figure out what the 
syntax of the messages is.

Another provider uses real SOAP, but their documentation doesn't match 
their WSDL. They have "optional" fields that the WSDL requires you to 
provide, and "required" fields that the WSDL lets you omit, just as one 
example.

The ones giving us ads give you a blob of PHP that you're supposed to 
run to fetch the ads. Often, it has a bunch of crap in there to make up 
for deficiencies in their database. Often, it misformats the result 
compared to how you want to format it (like, "no, thanks, we don't want 
the ad centered" or even leaving mismatched tags in). It invariably just 
dumps the ad to stdout, rather than giving it back to you so you can, 
say, plug it into a template or log to the database what you got so you 
can fix it when they break it. So every ad service I use, they drop me a 
couple hundred lines of awful PHP and I have to figure out what it does 
and rewrite it to actually work with our system.

(Yes, I'm being fairly vague about what I'm talking about specifically. 
Welcome to commercial software. :-)

So, yeah, I probably wind up getting tasked more often with figuring out 
WTF is going on with some new library thingie than most people. 
Nowadays, of course, much of that sort of stuff is web services instead 
of libraries, so it tends to be a bit better documented, because if 
nothing else it's commercial and they know you won't use it if it isn't 
documented.

-- 
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
  Helpful housekeeping hints:
   Check your feather pillows for holes
    before putting them in the washing machine.

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