Re: Re: Use modules or roll your own?

[vladb]

I guess the author of the original post has got a legitimate issue to worry about. His concern seems to be whether reusing the old wheel will work in his particular case to solve a 'custom' problem. This happened to me just recently. In one of my projects, I set out to write a bunch of modules to do RDBMS interaction. However, after realizing that I'm essentially doing the same work that Class::DBI already does, I hastily switched.

Later, however, I've discovered a number of features that the module lacked and that was a real set back as I was hoping to meet tight deadlines. So, I ended up hacking into the module to fix a few things (such as deleting cross reference records from tables with multiple primary keys). On one occassion, the behavior of the module was so unintuitive I ended up messing my database data in unexpected places.

In all, I say, if you ever go to reuse an old wheel, please do study it closely first. Check for any possible defects or lacking features before use. At times it may even be hazardous to introduce an unknown or poorly studied 'formula' (aka module) into your equation (aka project).

_____________________

# Under Construction