Technology

Today, L’Express.mu has been launched and it is positioned as a new product by La Sentinelle where people have the possibility to interact and comment on news items.

Unfortunately L’Express.mu is not working well (and this is a major understatement.)

It seems to me that the web application has been written from scratch instead of being based on something proven (either Open Source or not.) The problem seems to be connection-related i.e. the database server cannot accept any new connection presumably because the application has a simple two-tier architecture and it has not been tested properly when under heavy load.

 

When I taught my Software Architecture MSc course last year, this is something I spent a lot of time on: scalability is not something that can be tackled as an afterthought. If the application is not built with scalability in mind (by using a proper N-tiered architecture with a well-designed business layer) then there is no way it can become scalable without a partial rewrite.

Incidentally, the website runs on Windows 2003 Server and uses SQL Server 2005.

By the way, what is:

catch (Exception ex)
{
    throw ex;
}

supposed to mean?

The “paper” newspaper

In parallel with this new product, the normal (paper) newspaper is available at a new URL: www.lexpress-newspaper.com. Unfortunately, the technical team has decided to use a Flash application to display the newspaper. I wonder why? This makes referencing and quoting very difficult. Furthermore, Flash and Google are not really good friends… I would say that putting a newspaper online and making its content non-discoverable through Google is bizarre.

By the way, what is “Le site est mieux vu avec Internet Explorer et une résolution 1024 x 768.” supposed to mean? Is this a copy-paste from a 1998 website? Things have changed since 1998. In 2008, website creators are supposed to write:

“We comply with W3C standards like HTML and CSS and, consequently, you can use pretty much anything to access our website (like your computer, your mobile phone, your PDA, your coffee machine, etc.)”