[sldev] Rewriting the viewer (Re: sljirastats.com Linden Metrics Report)

[Rob Lanphier]

On 4/18/08 1:30 PM, Jesse Barnett wrote:
> Actually it was discussed extensively the first few weeks of SLDev & Rob coming on board in iirc 
> and meetings under the umbrella of plugin architecture. I would 
> imagine that the concensus has'nt changed from that time. Yes, it is a 
> serious problem and yes, it should be done, but no, no one wants to 
> tackle that beast and it is more expidient to just create sockets that 
> interface the jumbled mess in the backend for the plugins to go. You 
> hit the nail on the head with this : "I can understand any individual 
> developer's reluctance to try to do it (HELL, I have no idea where to 
> begin),"  It isn't just a matter of refactoring the GUI, the GUI is 
> everywhere and would involve a major rewrite of ALL the code. The code 
> sucks and everyone in the community and the Lindens know it sucks but 
> continually hammering to get someone, anyone to rewrite it isn't going 
> to be very productive.

I'll restate what I stated last year on this topic, pointing to this 
article from Joel Spolsky about Netscape:
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html

I'm glad Firefox and Thunderbird are around, and I use both of them as 
my primary apps for their respective functions.  However, while the 
approach was eventually successful in producing some really important 
software, it completely failed to achieve the desired result for 
Netscape Corporation (and for that matter, AOL after that).  We intend 
to survive the release of our source code ;-)

The viewer architecture is in much better shape than it was this time 
last year, and I think we have every reason to believe it will be much 
better next year.

Rob


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