in reply to Re^2: What is Enterprise Software?
in thread What is Enterprise Software?
Likewise. A few years ago I spent a week working with some consultants from a "household brand name" computer systems supplier, helping them write what they call Adapters and Connectors for part of their middleare product range.
The Connectors are the bits of glue that interface to the external systems and hardware. The Adapters perform the translation between the format of the information gathered from or supplied to those external entities, and the internal middleware comms protocol.
You have never seen such a lash up in your life. Most of the connectors and adapters are written during the post-sales installation and deployment phase, by post-sales engineers (who are usually more saleperson/liason than programmers). They get hacked together at the customers site and tested on-the-fly. I was supposed to modify two pieces of code that "were written by the guys in XXX office for a similar job", and adapt them to the task at hand. You cannot beleive what hookey, inefficient, polling loop nightmares they were. Really quite unbelievably bad.
Luckily, I got moved on by cirumstances before I had to make a decision about whether to speak up or shut up.