Tuesday May 16, 2006

Hacking SPS for Fun and Profit

N1 SPS (Service Provisioning System) is a rather complicated piece of software that uses almost all popular enterprise technologies that you can find around the web to solve something that was once seen as a rather simple problem: *Get some piece of software from one machine to a set of other machines.*

Automatically, and without (or with minimal) human interaction. To achieve this, it uses *ORM*, *XML*, *SOAP*, *XSLT*, *Java*, and (luckily) *Jython*.

Neverthless, complexity does not beat us, and we are able to get this beast working on Windows, Solaris, and Linux. Largely to the point where our customers are actually happy that we have built it, because it *solves their problem*.

Working as a sustaining engineer of this product brings you the great chance of solving some rather interesting and tricky problems resulting from complicated code base, non standard instalation process, unintuitive user interface, indirection, redirection, and too much abstraction at every imaginable level (it is enterprise software indeed).

I will try to share some of my observations hoping that it will make N1 SPS a better product that is not only a pleasure to use, but also a pleasure to develop and sustain.