I won't say that Oracle Financials is growing on me, but the solution that we seem to be migrating towards is: Ignore everything stupid that Oracle does, replicate the important data to a separate database, maintain all of the data in a normal way. Of course, some nifty triggers are going to have to be written to translate Oracle-Crap to Good-Stuff and back, so that the data can all be kept in sync.
Met with Rasmus, JByers, and a few others in San Francisco (at LinuxCare) to discuss internationalization in PHP. The PHPi home is at SourceForge at http://php-i18n.sourceforge.net/, but it's just getting off the ground. There are a few efforts out there that have started internationalization on different levels. Hiro (can't remember his last name =(, while working for a Far East web portal added JIS and other Japaneese support to PHP to accept form POST vars. It seems like it would be a good starting point to see what problems he ran in to.
On the other hand, an IBM project called ICU exists as an apache/php module. It seems quite messy, written in C++ and prone to bring down the apache thread if not handled with care. Carl, the contact at IBM, said that it was under a sort of BSD license, so hopefully we can fix up whatever is wrong with it and see what it affords us. They seem to have much of the VERY specific work done, including sorting charts, multi character glyph grouping, etc. It was done using a collate function that normalizes the input string to separate out diacritical marks (accents) and group characters and then run it through various levels of sorting (exact, whitespace insensitive, case insensitive, etc.) Looks very useful, but it looks like more than we would need.
The final debate was on how to handle the difference between UTF-8, UCS-2, and differentiating between them and high ascii. There seems to be no good way at all (is a form being submitted in multibyte japaneese, or is it a JPEG). When we do a strlen() on it, do we get the number of bytes or the number of characters. Hopefully someone has some magic solution to this one.
So the more I look at the Oracle Financials package, the more upset I get. I'm amazed that something this ugly could have lasted so long. I commented to a co-worker that I would have hoped the free market would have burried this beast long ago, but it seems that lately, especially in the tech field, survival-of-the-fittest doesn't apply, and competition is unheard of.
Don't get me wrong. Oracle the DB is fine. Does things that MySQL is a few years behind on. But their database schema was written in the dark ages, and because an "easy upgrade path" was necessary to keep the money flowing in, once it was out there, it couln't be changed.
There seems to be a trend in prime time television shows today. Average Joe Amature cast stuck in a less than interesting situation, being video taped. I mean, when did it become more interesting to see someone win a million dollars on an easy question than to see someone actually display some intelligence?
That stock options segment of Mission Impossible 2 was ridiculous. And people here in Sunnyvale were cheering when they saw it.
New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.
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