The wonder of you!

I think it was the late Elvis Presley that sung "The Wonder Of You", if may of course been just a line, but I came across a fantastic technology last night which made me thank - that is a great piece of work.

Many of the interfaces we build are web-based as we like to combine the best in breed of all languages for whatever purpose we are putting them to. I had my CMS in PHP and my R server both happily chugging away but I was not satisfied. They need to talk with one another. Initially I picked up the client (written in Java) and started the lengthy translation to PHP, after about an hour I thought - why? There has to be a better way?

This is where a little Googling can get you a long way and I came across the PHP-Java-Bridge software - fantastic! A quick compilation, a scratch of the head over conflicting php.ini files and Andrews my uncle - there it was a beautiful piece of PHP running through a JVM answering the calls of a wild R server.

All I can say is my faith in code reuse is restored and I went to bed a happy man. It bought home to me though a very serious point which is that in business you always have legacy code which most developers will tell you "rewrite", "re-engineer" or some other "re-" word which crosses their mind at the time. The real answer is in this day and age and if you have been careful about your previous technology choices, i.e. open standards, formats and mature languages, you can normally find a way to continue to use old software but with a new facade, saving you time and as a value proposition - saving you $$$.

Please write and tell us about your code re-writing experience for your business - was it expensive, do you regret doing it, what would you do different?