Wasabi, Why?
I honestly can't believe this was easier than just porting FogBugz to ASP.NET or PHP. If they're smart enough to write a compiler, can't they just write a converter? I.e. Read in all the old code and have a little program that spits out the code in the target syntax? Then you can maintain your code base on something other than a home-baked PHP/ASP-branching language!
Labels: business_of_software
posted by Michael Sica at
10:14 PM
6 Comments:
"Then you can maintain your code base on something other than a home-baked PHP/ASP-branching language!"
Then you'd have two code bases to maintain instead of one!
They don't need it to run on ASP & PHP. PHP is cross platform, and ASP.NET has Mono for *nix!
I think they over-thought the problem....
I disagree.
For a start, they already had an ASP code base. Throwing that away and rewriting from scratch would be a colossal waste of effort. Secondly, they undoubtedly have a lot of customers in corporate environments who are using IIS and SQL Server. PHP would be no good for that! Finally, I"ve never heard anyone say that Mono is ready for the prime time.
I think Joel's just applying what he learned from when he worked on the Excel team. They wrote their own compiler so that they could cross compile for Windows and Mac. He's blogged about it before.
Talking of Joel, I got to met him today at the FogBugz world tour event in London - very interesting guy!
P.S. Why does this stupid comments system always make me enter the CAPTCHA twice?!
John, they didn't have to throw away their ASP code base. If they can write a compiler, they can write a converter!
There is going to come a point in time where you won't be able to run ASP. According to FogBugz ASP doesn't even come installed with Windows server anymore.
What makes Mono not ready for prime time? Check how much it's used in commercial software: http://www.mono-project.com/Software
Oh, and I have no control over the captcha. It's whatever Blogger is doing.
I don't think they overthought the problem. Wasabi was originally 'Thisle' which was just a subset of ASP. They compiled that into PHP. That's the converter you're talking about.
Then they started adding features to it (like PHP/ASP only blocks).
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