The Legend of the Rewrite

I think the word "rewrite" has become something of a myth on Subeta... whispered in back alleys of the forums, mentioned in the shoutbox and followed by eerie silence... there's probably even some religious cults that secretly worship and pray that one day, Rewrite will descend from the heavens and transform Subeta as we know it. But does it really exist?

I'm alx, the main programmer for Subeta, and I wanted to talk a bit about the "rewrite"... what it is (and isn't), why it exists (yes, it does exist!), and what's going on with it.

A few months after I started working on Subeta, it was decided that a complete re-do of the site was necessary. I mean a redo from a programming perspective, as in a do-over of the code that creates Subeta. The old code is complicated, buggy, and slow. It needs to be replaced with faster, better designed code. Think of this as replacing the engine in an old car... the outside still looks the same, but the inner workings are all different. It was decided that we would continue maintaining the old site, but devote most of our time to the creation of a parallel rewritten Subeta, that would mimic the look and feel of the old site, but be all shiny and new under the hood.

Unfortunately, it didn't go all according to plan. Maintaining the current site turned out to be a bigger task than anticipated, and bugs went unfixed as work on the rewrite progressed. As time passed, the users (that's you guys) probably felt that we'd abandoned the site entirely, since nothing was changing. We thought we could fix that by letting you all see the new rewrite site and play with it, but still, it was for testing purposes only... nothing you did there really counted on Subeta proper.

So that's how the rewrite came to be. Currently "the rewrite" exists as a chunk of source code (a pretty big chunk -- 44,000 lines of code). Together with a database and web servers, this code creates a Subeta site that's half complete... it has forums, wardrobe, smail, some pet functionality, etc, but some stuff doesn't work yet. Okay, a lot of stuff doesn't work yet ;) It'd take a substantial amount of work still to bring this code up to the point where it could replace Subeta. And even then, it'd be an all-at-once change from old site to new site, which might annoy some people who are used to things currently.

Now, more than a year since the rewrite project began, we sat down and evaluated what we've done so far, and decided to change our strategy. To put it bluntly, we're abandoning the idea of creating a separate rewrite that will eventually "take over" for the current Subeta.

Instead, we're going to go about the rewrite of the site gradually, by rewriting specific features at a time. Basically, the rewritten features will share no code with the old Subeta site, but they'll still be a part of that site (if that makes sense). That means they'll be on subeta.net and you'll be able to use them normally (they'll be "live"), but they'll be backed by newer, better, less buggy code. As we work, more features will be rewritten against the new code, all on live subeta for you to use. This way, Subeta will gradually improve and accumulate bug-fixes, but it'll be in a way that lets you guys get the benefits of the improvements now, rather than waiting months for the rewrite to launch.

But wait... what about all that work we did, those 44,000 lines of rewrite code? Was all that time spent ignoring the live Subeta and working on the old rewrite wasted? No, not at all. Those 44,000 lines of rewritten code contain numerous ideas and improvements and new features that will be integrated directly into our in-place rewrite (I'm going to call this "new" rewrite a recode from now on, to avoid confusion. Make sure you all start using that word, so I can feel popular for coining the phrase.) So nothing we've done so far will really be a waste :)

I hope this cleared up some confusion/rumors/myths about the rewrite! If you have any questions, feel free to post in the comments, and I'll try to answer whenever I'm around.

-Alex, Subeta Programmer