[thelist] Award Winning Site???

[Seb]

Yay. The Dixons Group. I bet they regret not choosing my company as their
supplier now. :)

These clowns moved over to Broadvision a while ago. Their operation has
standardised on MS products, and the rumour is that this is part of a deal
to get preferential prices for retail. The official line is that x86
hardware is cheaper per MHz, and BV is really MHz hungry. Of course, this is
pure bull because BV running on Windows/IIS is about as stable as a
one-legged unicyclist in a hurricane. (BV have been trying to patch a memory
leak bug in WinNT/BV4.1 for nearly a year for one of my clients, and have
only admitted it's their problem this week under threat of 7 digit
litigation.)

Their sites are back now. The problem appears to be a really bad code
problem. Products in BroadVision have a unique identifier, and a single
price associated with a product. Apparently for Dixons, this wasn't good
enough, so their solution was to base the product on the unique ID, and the
price on an associated ID. So far so good, but putting the product in the
cart was done without a check on the associated ID, so you could put product
A in your cart, and with a little tweak of the horrific URL that BV uses for
session identification, etc, you could use the price from product B.

Don't get me wrong, this isn't a fault of BV or IIS (they have enough faults
without this). This is bad application design, pure and simple.

So, it looks like after a few people bought 400 quid TV's for ridiculous
prices, someone got wise, and they pulled the plug for 24 hours whilst they
could rework the code.


Seb.



----- Original Message -----
From: <martin.p.burns at uk.pwcglobal.com>
To: <thelist at lists.evolt.org>
Sent: Wednesday, October 10, 2001 5:52 PM
Subject: RE: [thelist] Award Winning Site???


>
> Memo from Martin P Burns of PricewaterhouseCoopers
>
> -------------------- Start of message text --------------------
>
> Or alternatively, try to get to any of the Dixons Group sites
> http://www.thelink.com
> http://www.currys.co.uk
> http://www.pcworld.co.uk
> http://www.dixons.com
>
> Background:
> http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/51/22148.html
>
> Don't know why they moved to IIS from Solaris.
>
> Cheers
> Martin
>
>
>
>
> Please respond to thelist at lists.evolt.org
>
> Sent by:  thelist-admin at lists.evolt.org
>
> To:   thelist at lists.evolt.org
> cc:
>
>
> Subject:  RE: [thelist] Award Winning Site???
>
>
>
> Exactly! Fortunately, the present Mrs. Morris has a paper catalogue so we
> looked in there and immediately found what I was looking for. I never did
> find it online, even using the PC...
>
> As a matter of interest, try going to http://www.woolworths.co.uk and do a
> search on Lara Croft.
>
> Then try to work out why I get 718 'matches'...
>
>
>
> --------------------- End of message text --------------------
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