Slashdot Mirror
Case Study of Bungie.Net
nmb3000 writes "MSDN recently put up a case study of Bungie.Net (much more detailed than a previous one), the homepage for the creators of the Halo series, and its transition from Perl to .NET and ASP. From the study: 'The Bungie.net site is the online companion to the wildly successful Halo 2 video game for Xbox, released in November 2004 by Microsoft. The site also acts as the community hub for all things related to Bungie games. Built with the Microsoft .NET Framework, Bungie.net serves up more than 4 million pages per day, accumulating 300 gigabytes of online game statistics per month from more than 1 million games played daily.' This is an interesting look into the creation and integration of the very large and interactive website which was voted 'Most Innovative Design' by IGN Entertainment in 2004."
I guess it's innovative to not render properly in Firefox.
I mean, Microsoft's very own Hotmail is on FreeBSD servers (or at least was at one point). I am not a flaming-sword wielding OS (either kind) zealot; but why fix something if it ain't broke? Strikes me as more of a publicity stunt than an attempt to improve functionality...
I think with the interesting people, their lives can't possibly be wrapped up into a nice little package.
For once something has come out of msdn that doesn't read like a blatant advertisement. This study is open about the amount of time that it took to create this site, although the forum development and security testing was not included as it was outsourced to other companies. As a non-MS developer I'm naturally wary of studies like this but seems like a competent piece of work although I thought it was spoilt with the simpering hero-grams at the end... "Without the ease of .NET we wouldn't have even started"...ick!
It's rendered fine for me in Firefox since 1.0.2 when I started visiting the site (it may have worked before that).
Of course, regardless of whether I use IE or Firefox, it seems really, really sluggish. And by that, I mean the client side rendering, not the server side code, so this isn't a diss on ASP.NET.
Forget the whales - save the babies.
Let's be honest. Although the insinuation within the case study is that perl was not capable of handling the task of getting so much traffic, and ASP.NET intrinsically is, this is clearly false. They could've rearchetected the website to cache content better, and perform better, but instead the decision was made to use the website as a showcase of ASP.NET technologies. There's nothing wrong with that, but we should not pretend that it's something that it's not.
I used up all my sick days, so I'm calling in dead.
Question: Is python useful at rendering dynamic webpages? What about mysql integration?
which was voted "Most Innovative Design" by IGN Entertainment in 2004.
Most Innovative Design??? You have to be joking! A it doesn't render properly in firefox and that freaky scrolling (try the mouse wheel)... what on earth were they thinking? Oh - the web designers were probably thinking profit!
Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so. - Douglas Adams
it renders fine in FireFox you fucking troll.
The site is designed very poorly. The website is no where near W3 compliant HTML/X-HTML/CSS. It runs extremely poorly in Firefox. They don't even serve up a proper DOCTYPE, and for that alone I would not hire their front-end developers for any website design.
Honestly, for all the back-end work, they should have gotten a GOOD front-end developer who understood design and standards.
"BEHOLD, CORN!!" - Dr. Weird, ATHF
Description: Focused on the reimplementation of most of the existing Perl based site on the .NET Framework. Some features, however, were left as Perl implementations.
.NET? If not, why not?
I'm curious, which features, and why? And are they still Perl, or have they been subsequently ported to
"I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar."
-Hoban Washburn
mostly alt tags and & instead of & in uris
This page is not Valid HTML 4.01 Transitional!
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
-Ben
Neither the original poster's answer nor your own was relevant. I assume the problem is my verbal talent.
(I am now wondering what moderators moded the non-relevant answer from the original poster up? They have an application that collect mod points on Ms campus for mod:ing "correct" opinions!? :-)
Karma: Excellent (My Karma? I wish...:-( )
I would just like to say that Halo is^H^H 2 is still the pinacle and greatest shining example of what first person shooters strive to be. It is a work or surpassing excellence, unmatched in brilliance. I give thanks daily for it's creation, knowing that without it my life would not have been worth living. Playing on Xbox live is the most immesive and rewarding.... ...Oh... this is about just Bungie?
Ummmm... ummmmm.....
May the Maths Be with you!
They start out by saying that Myth was an RPG. If you can't tell the difference between a RPG and an RTS game that's just sad.
Myth and Myth 2 are two of my favorite RTS games ever, great play out of the box and tons of cool mods.
Only on slashdot can you take an extensive and educational article about architecture, performance, scalability, etc. and boil it down to "it doesn't render properly on firefox" and dismiss it. Hilarious.
Welcome to the world of managers. You can either make it flashy and please us, or you can not finish on time, get fired and we'll hire someone who makes it flashy and pleases us.
But I would be pretty wary of a website voted "most innovative design" by IGN
There is truth in humor.
Oh, wait, I think I just figured out why they didn't pay attention to those. Cognitive dissonance.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
To be fair the CSS validates just fine, simple as it is.
The website is not standards compliant. In fact it just as broken if not moreso than Slashdot:
.NET technology to make it all possible is bunk though. You build just as scalable sites using Apache and mod_perl on a Linux or BSD box (and it might not even be as processor intensive either). You might need to be more disciplined, but you can employ page caching, separation of logic and presentation, etc. with a Free softweare stack quite readily.
* There is no DOCTYPE--it just starts with an HTML tag
* There are UPPERCASE tags mixed with lowercase tags. This is bad practise and strictly speaking all tags in HTML4 and XHTML are supposed to be lowercase.
* There are proprietary attributes in the document (ms_positioning)
Besides spweing forth really crappy HTML, the techniques the authors used to do the layout are exteremely poor. The site is the exact OPPOSITE of semantic web design. Remember 1996 when websites were all becoming GIF Jigsaw puzzles? That is almost what bungie did. I see empty DIVs, no-break-space characters and some javascript malarky.
and as far as position:fixed goes, at least FireFox supports it even if it is slow...IE DOESN'T SUPPORT IT AT ALL. What you see on Bungie is the aforementioned javascript fakery. Don't give me static about FF bugs--it is LIGHT YEARS ahead of IE in terms of correct support of standards.
Bungie very obviously didn't get an award for good coding practise. The site may be architecturally correct but the coding as abysmal. Furthermore, the site COULD have been made to work far better on FF than it does not WITHOUT FANCY WORKAROUNDS. As a matter of fact, if they DID use position:fixed and other CSS positioning and layout techniques properly it would work extremely well. It would not, however, look as sharp in IE6. Understandably, since Bungie is a Microsoft property, they'll use Microsoft platforms and development tools, and test much more extensivley with IE6.
As for the case study touted by MS, it makes some very important points about how to build the architecture of a site. Any suggestion that you need
Where the ASP.NET solution excels is in its IDE and library of components--Visual Studio.NET really does kick ass there. It's just too bad that the output to the browser tends to suffer when developers get caught up in a fancy design (not only does the HTML look ugly and break standards, it results in inconsistent behaviour). I hope the next version of VS.NET has addressed this.
There is a bonus to port your programs to different architectures (or at least use different compilers).
There should be a similar win to use different browsers? You iron out more bugs and get more standard compliant that way.
We are talking about a professional support team, here. They sell to Xbox mainly, so the people browsing might use different OS and browsers.
Or am I assuming too much?
Karma: Excellent (My Karma? I wish...:-( )