Forum OpenACS Q&A: Marketing and damned lies.

Vignette's roadshow was in town yesterday NZST; I couldn't attend
since I was working on a live site down problem caused by a bug in the
Vignette software (oh the irony) a client of mine runs.  But an
interesting little tidbit came up - one of the client's managers said
that Vignette were claiming to AOL had switched to Vignette, and were
citing the 35,000 hits/s number.

A quick look at the main AOL servers for member pages, the main page,
and so forth, suggests everything's still on AOLServer, with the
exception of my.aol.com.  Since Vignette don't support AOLServer, this
claim seems a bit odd.  Anyone know what the real story is?

Mmm.  That's what I thought, but the Vignette reps were apparently quite clear that the whole shooting match was on Vignette.

Certainly AOL/TimeWarner properties like time.com are.

When I was contracting at Warner Music in Burbank (ended March 01), they were using all of these tools--the music video site instavid.com, for example, was built using ATG Dynamo (though the initial hits to the sites are to Netscape Enterprise Servers. After that interaction, you are hitting Java pages when you click on stuff). Vignette was used to build the tools to do things like publish videos to the site or to get access to various reports, etc.

There were some other related sites that were similarly put together.
I don't know how far ranging the use of these tools is at Warner Music, especially now, since after AOL bought them there was a push to move away from doing web pages dynamically and instead to publish things statically but to update them often, so things would seem to be "dynamic" in the sense of changing frequently.

This, of course, is how AOL does things on AOL. A bit amusing (or, as the person who started this thread might say, ironic) given that AOL has AOLserver, but I get the feeling that AOLserver isn't really viewed as being that important strategically at AOL--yes, they use it for various things, but having such a tool doesn't seem to affect their vision of how to do things.

This all, of course, is extrapolation on my part based on my Warner experience, so if anyone else knows better, please post. Do remember  though--even if there are groups there that use it enthusiastically, that doesn't mean that the people responsible for the "big picture" care for it or the kind of database-backed website approach that it enables.

P.S. I actually found someone at Warner Music who knew what the ACS is and was interested in seeing it used for intranet-type stuff. Trouble is, he was just a tech-writer(!) and I was at the end of my tenure there, but it was fun talking to him about how it could be useful.

Yes - the ICQ one is interesting.  I just installed a hotfix for load related problems at a client which was developed as part of the ICQ deployment.

Of course, that client's kind of upset that, having been told in August that Vignette's push into JSP wouldn't affect TCL support, Vignette will no longer be supporting TCL sites as of next year.

Maybe I'm just stupid, but I've never understood the benefit of Vignette. I'm working with Vignette 5.6 right now and we have a bunch of heavy-duty solaris boxes. Nevertheless the application is so slow that we cannot serve up dynamic content on any of the popular pages on our site.

The architecture for Vignette's dynamic components seems to be very similar to a server side include. So you have a big overhead just to have one line of Tcl code execute within a page (or "template" as Vignette calls them). We ended up with some horrible hacks just to get something as simple as a cookie set. We had to run this code on the client side using Javascript. I expect we could overcome these problems by purchasing the hideously expensive "personalization" module.

Version control is a joke. I think you're supposed to purchase some kind of version control module. My colleague wrote some nifty scripts to export all the code into CVS but it would be far easier just to keep it in CVS in the first place.

The API is weak. You don't have nice features like filters that can run on every page. Your Tcl code gets eval'd so strange things happen with backslashes. The database API doesn't allow any of the nice features I'm used to from the AOLserver drivers, such as finding out how many rows were updated by a SQL statement. Its very non-intuitive to someone that understands SQL. For example, the SEARCH TABLE command is often used to execute DML statements.

The documentation is confusing. They don't clearly tell you what a procedure returns, and what errors it can throw. Debugging is hell. You don't get a nice stack trace. The error message doesn't necessarily point you to the line of code with the problem: "Error Occurred In Command Block At Lines 132-168" is not very helpful.

As far as price goes, I haven't any idea what it costs. Vignette keeps these things secret. But the numbers I've heard are astronomical. Plus the license terms are quite restrictive. I've heard that they limit the number of page requests per day you can accept before the cost goes up.

I think that one of Vignette's big selling points was that it enabled you to separate the HTML (presentation) from the Tcl (code) so that designers and programmers could easily work together. But I can't see any difference between a Vignette template and an AOLserver ADP page.

Another big "selling point" is that web pages are "cached". It sounds very impressive but in practice this just means that the entire page is written to the file system on the web server (which is why you need a server side include to have dynamic content). A smarter cacheing strategy would probably be to cache just the content, then dynamically format it with HTML when the page is served.

All the code is stored in the database (not the filesystem) so you need a proprietary Java client to manage your code. You can't use any of those nice tools like grep that you've learned to love for the past five years.

I could go on, but suffice it to say that I'm completely mystified how Vignette can make statements on its web site, like the one I pulled off its front page today: "Quickly deliver dynamic content in a stable, secure environment". Talk about "marketing and damned lies" In my experience, quite the reverse is true.