A few months ago we created a small application to manage the content for a custom project. The materials are organized by topics, modules, steps, objectives and assets. A topic is made up of one or more modules, while a module is made up of objectives and steps which may include an asset — pretty "simple" stuff.

During the initial development we had a pretty tight dateline so we organized the tasks between our team and got going as quick as we could. When we faced an obstacle we found a bandaid to get around it. It was done on time and met the client’s requirements. Since then it was put on maintenance mode, with only minimum code changes and new functionality kept to almost nothing.

You could imagine by the title of this entry that such maintenance mode has ended very recently as there are a few critical requests being made. While we narrow down those additions, I thought I would get started on adding a bit of logging to the application. I wrote a component (the application is written in Cold Fusion) that is kept in the Application scope so it can be easily reference throughout the application. The component takes 3 or 4 bits of information and basically enters a new record into a db table — nothing too crazy here!

However, I realized that the simple addition of this little bit of code across our application is quite a task to accomplish and I cannot imagine it would get easier as functionality requests increase. I have learned a little bit about object oriented approaches during the last couple of semesters and I can see where such approach would be of great benefit on this application. However, I do not feel comfortable enough to be able to architect the application into an OO foundation. The learning curve adds to the complexity of the decision making process and that makes me wonder and ask, at what point do you decide you need to re-write an application?