AFTK explanation …

So, not posting to a blog which is rarely read is not a big deal. And, I’m not going to say this was any different.

I stopped posting when I found out that I had to learn SAP for a new Student Information System (SIS) at UCSB. It was supposed to take at least a year to learn SAP and another year to implement a UCSB SIS system. Fortunately, after two months we found out that all the promises that SAP gave us were wrong (the salesman lied, whats new). Their SIS system could not handle UCSB’s grading or graduation logic.

Within the two months of training on SAP I did learn all that anyone really needs to know about SAP. STAY AWAY! STAY FAR AWAY! It is a mainframe system that was too big to translate into the new world; so SAP decided to replicate the mainframe environment into a pseudo virtual machine. If you want to speed things up, then add more hardware and deploy more virtual machines. That will load balance the systems. Of course, it doesn’t help solve the central issue … SAP is slow. Really slow! And, it also doesn’t help that the system is still based on a mainframe. Which means modern day web programming is like pulling teeth from a lion. Hard and your efforts usually get butchered in the process. (for you SAP developers out there, /se80 … WTF!!!)

After that I started going full time on an imaging project in .NET. Our division decided to use Atalasoft’s DotNet Imaging for both the Windows and Web frameworks. It’s a pretty well developed product considering the application space. But, it’s far from “easy to use”. I have been working on the web side, and I hope to put up some posts on how to use the product with ASP.NET MVC within the next couple weeks. Atalasoft doesn’t officially support ASP.NET MVC, but they are very excited about the idea of integration; so they have provided some support during the process (the sales team seemed excited; but I dare not mention MVC within the support requests). All-in-all Atalasoft has a product which deals with a difficult area of web development and they are trying to do the best they can with the resources they have.

Other than that, I’m trying to find time to develop a jQuery breadcrumb plugin (http://code.google.com/p/jbreadcrumb/). I’m not finding much time to work on it … but, plugins are a step-by-step process.