[mirsadm]

It would have been possible but probably not in a week. The code base was written using QT and half the singletons would be lazily created at seemingly random places through hundreds of signal/slot calls (sometimes through the event queue if it came from another thread).

The singletons were just one of the many problems. I remember there was a "database.cpp" file which handled all access to the SQL database. It was over 10k lines of code and had hundreds of structs to represent all the tables in the system. The person responsible for that ensured he had a job by only working with that source code.

[glogla]

Wow.

This makes me thing that Java is better for this kind of big "enterprise" application, not because it's faster or more enterprise or somesuch, but because it's more limited, and therefore less things can go wrong.

I worked in two banks, developing web banking in one and middleware service in the other, and while there were some strange things (what's with banks and XML, really?) there was nothing that terrible here.

But then I'm pretty sure that someone will share their Java horror story.

[mirsadm]

I could write a book about how bad everything was set up :). This place loved to abuse XML. It had > 2000 XML files to configure the system. Objects in code were "generic" and instantiated based on XML configuration. You could inherit configuration from base XML files. It was basically impossible to determine where a piece of the system was set up from.

As bad as everything was it was a fantastic learning experience for me though.