> Perrin or others involved in the old eToys (or anyone in the new Toys) -- > does anyone know if this is the same mod_perl technology you guys wrote?
I'm not involved in that anymore, so I don't have first-hand information. However, a brief look at the site makes me think they are not using any of what we wrote. The URL structures and query args (i.e. the public API of the site) are all very different. > I think it will make an interesting success story follow up if it is > successful because it would also show how easy it was for the intellectual > property written in mod_perl to be resold and reintegrated into another IT > infrastructure which would make VCs happy (ie they would think more about > being able to fund projects based on mod_perl if they know they could > always resell the IP). You have to remember that what we wrote was a specific application, not a generic store or application server. That code would only be useful if you wanted a store that did everything (data model, navigation, order processing) exactly the way we did. I very much doubt KB is that similar. Also, the documentation was great for an in-house project but not enough for a packaged commercial app. There was a basic shared knowledge assumed in most of it about the business goals and environment. Keep in mind that we wrote very little infrastructure code - no more than I would expect a J2EE project this large to write. The infrastructure came from CPAN, Apache, etc. and is known to be very portable. I suspect that KB has a team who supports their site and they chose to use the technologies they already have in place. People hate change, and looking at a foreign codebase, possibly in a language you don't know, is daunting. It would be the same thing if someone walked into an ASP shop with a bundle of WebLogic code and said "make it run, and work with our legacy systems, with these changes, by Christmas. And don't stop supporting our regular site. Oh, and we didn't hire any of the developers who wrote it or the business people who told them what to write, so you'll just have to read the source if you have questions that aren't in the documentation." Doesn't sound that appealing, does it? - Perrin
