Comments on: The train that Web 2.0 Missed : Part 2 of 3

By: Lawrence Salberg

Lawrence Salberg — Wed, 11 Oct 2006 22:53:16 +0000

Holy cow... I have been thinking the EXACT thing you have been writing about. With RoR so popular, how hard could it be to write a better class registration app? At UCF, it is an abomination.

For instance, I need to register another class this spring on Fridays (to make use of an otherwise wasted trip to campus for only a 50 minute lab). So, I try to search for all classes on Fridays.... No, that brings up every class that has any kind of Friday meeting, including classes that are scheduled on Mon, Wed, etc... which won't work for me this Spring because I'm doing Tues/Thurs...

So, I have to run a search on every class that is not on Sun/Mon/Tue/Wed/Thu/Sat. Needless to say, their server times out every time... it probably pulls every class and then tries to filter it on the webserver, rather than a direct db call. And the timeout is five minutes, not 30 seconds, so this is a stretch.

Worst of all, I have to then sort through all the available options (if I ever could get a result) and look for classes of interest. Now my college knows my degree, so why can't I get an option just to search for open classes that I haven't yet taken or registered for? Who knows? Because the administration doesn't think beyond tuition, I guess.

I would love to see someone develop an app (maybe me if I get angry enough - ha ha) that trumps this, and then through some sort of cron job, could yank the various school's data around the country. While you couldn't register via this app, it would be so embarrasingly simple, that you could use the app to extort these schools to upgrade their registration systems to something a little less dBase III.

By: Rea

Rea — Mon, 02 Oct 2006 18:56:36 +0000

Wow, that’s pretty annoying. And I complained about how I had to register for classes!

By: VIP1

VIP1 — Sat, 30 Sep 2006 23:50:45 +0000

Peoplesoft, if not implemented properly can be a royal P.I.T.A. I do Peoplesoft Implementations for a living (just technical installs and upgrades, no development or functional configuration) and it can be hairy implementing even simple things like simple workflows.

On the backend, Peoplesoft is just a big hairy monster cobbled together with a bunch of stuff just slapped together with a flimsy HTML robe.. :)

You would be REALLY pissed off if you found out how much those "hard to get" functional consultants were making while they implemented that "state of the art" ERP student admin system.

Oh and making these two systems talk to each other? that would require another "Integration Broker" thingy, cost half a million dollars prolly, and it will still suck.

But peoplesoft is good for us peoplesoft consultants. :)