Still DoesNotWorkplace
by Volker Weber
Out of curiosity I checked whether IBM Lotus DoesNotWorkplace is still up and running, and indeed, it is. It has been upgraded to 2.5 and it still does not work. Which means, it takes 30+ seconds to display a page after you clicked a link. And it still has lots of quirks. Go check it out. The old user accounts are still there and you can test drive an up-to-date Workplace installation.
Comments
My guess that the whole stuff never was tested/intented/build for the "wild". In a high bandwith environment with pretty fast servers you will get acceptable results. Seems the whole system was hijacked by someone (in marketing) who doesn't know what bandwidth means.
My 2c
:-) stw
Actually, I don't think so. Take away the marketing and you get "portal". There is no portal that performs. And it's not the bandwidth.
I don’t understand why pre-compiling isn’t more popular in the portal space. Of course, some portlets / JSPs / whatever can be highly personalised in portal environments, meaning they may need to compile on first touch, but there must be some optimisation strategies around the corner...
@Volker
Quite true. While the general idea of a portal is cool: assemble bits and pieces from various sources to get your custom information through the door (or what else does portal mean ).
In reality latency does haunt you... http latency, db latency, jsp latency, javascipt latency etc....
So the big question: how could a portal perform? Brute force (a.k.a. Big iron doesn't eliminate latency, only processing time) won't help that much. Would lessons from MSN, Lycos and Yahoo help? There it seems to work quite well (based on hand tuned CGI I presume)
@Ben:
JSP compile time seems just one of the issues. I would guess answering the question "How real must realtime be?" honestly would help a lot.
@Me:
Would an Ajax approach help? Get the basic screen fast and then populate the dynamic pieces bit by bit.
:-) stw
Stephan, I have a high banddwidth environment with fast servers and this thing has been fundamentally broken for me. I'll be posting more on that in the next few days, but it's disheartening to me that 2.5 still isn't any better... [sigh]
-Grey
