The results from the Plat_forms contest have finally been announced. You can find a brief overview and the full results here .
While the Revolution Systems team did not come out the winner, overall I'm happy with how the contest turned out. They seemed to have focused in on some areas that I didn't expect, but they definitely show everyone in a fair light.
As I believe I mentioned in a previous blog post, our two biggest mistakes were strategic and not really code related. We should have opted to completely ignore the SOAP aspects of the application. We knew that SOAP support in Perl is pretty poor going in and Phil even took some time to code up some libraries to make it a bit easier for us.
The other mistake we made was to do "big bang" integration at the end. While many developers loath big bang integration, in our day-to-day environment it rarely if ever causes us any trouble. But leaving the integration until the end of a 30 hour work session when we were exhausted was a mistake. I know of at least a couple of requirements we missed simply because we forgot to link them into the site properly. Code was all there, we were just tired!
