Recently, I had to make my way through some ColdFusion code because my job's external and staging websites (which haven't been updated in years prior to when I got there) use it.
My advice: Run far away from ColdFusion. It does suck as much as you've heard, if not more. I don't know why MySpace is using it (if they still are).
Myspace was originally written in Coldfusion, they ported to ASP.NET and the current system handles 1.5 Billion page views per day and up to 2.3 million concurrent users (source: MIX Conference 2006 http://www.andreas-kraus.net/blog/handling-15-billion-page-v...)
MySpace wasn't always .NET. It was ColdFusion before .NET v2 came out. Not that ColdFusion would have made any difference.
That said, I'd argue that no, Microsoft did not kill MySpace. Generalizations like this are wrong. There are many more .NET enterprise developers out there then there are Ruby or Node or Python. With quantity comes a varying degree of ability. MySpace killed themselves by lowering their standards to the easy-to-find .NET developer instead of setting the bar higher. Once you lower the standard by which you hire developers, it's a cycle. The new guys will lower the standard a little more to hire the next set, etc.
The lesson to be learned here is if you can't find a good developer, don't blame the technology stack you've selected, blame your recruiter. Find the person you want, they are out there.
Myspace was an XSS playground. You could embed javascript into anyone's profile, by leaving a flash applet (or for that matter a java applet) in a comment, and having it do an openurl to a javascript: url, which would execute in the context of the user viewing it.
I had fun replacing people's profile pictures after the page loaded, or stopping all of that annoying background music.
It was also possible to capture someone's document.cookie, as late as 2008.
Stackoverflow doesn't seem to have many problems with it. Anyone who has done any C# programming knows .Net is * embarrassingly fast* these days. It'll save you a lot of "scaling" money.
What killed MySpace is poor management. It is one of those companies that still don't get that good engineers are as precious as good lawyers.
yeah, brings back those myspace memories for me. the browser even became unusable as well - just like it used to, with those decked out myspace themes. (actually, it's amazing to think that IE survived some of those profiles.)
MySpace letting people put CSS and HTML into their pages was a huge security nightmare. My wife, before she left the company, led the security team and it was a constant battle to keep JS injection attacks off the site. I can only imagine how much worse it would be in 2022 vs 2008.
Agreed. Web development seems more approachable and I think MySpace has a lot to do with that. Allowing users to post html and css on their profile was probably the best feature! I think it also made programming relatable to a lot of people who wouldn’t have tried it otherwise.
They put a really strong emphasis on lowering the barrier to entry. While you're right that it still requires you to write code, so did the MySpace weirdness of olde. I think the difference is it allowed you to only write the code, and they would handle the rest.
It has less bloat if you use lots of embedded scripts. My point is that this problem has been solved before in an even cleverer way and was used by hundreds of engineers in MySpace's heyday, so I'm surprised the authors had not considered it.
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