I haven’t been freelancing all that long, so maybe this is a common scenario.  I recently bid on (and won) a contract to translate a website from JSP to PHP.  No design or functionality changes are part of this contract, nor are there any database changes - just a language change.  I’m not sure what the reasoning was, but the client seemed pretty dead set against keeping the JSP stuff. Ok, fine, I’m down with doing it, I mean money is money and the job is easy for me; as a fluent PHP and Java programmer, this isn’t a huge challenge. I only have compiled WARs and no java source to work from, but that’s ok, the JSP gives up most of the keys to the castle when it calls in classes to perform certain functions.

So, does this come up often? I wonder what the motivation is? Could it be the lack of skilled Java contract programmers in the Portland area? Or the somewhat overabundance and availability  of PHP programmers around here? It most certainly could be the former, but the latter is definitely not a true statement - pretty much all the local talent has either fled the scene (left the state) or are locked into some sweet gigs they won’t give up to save their lives. I guess one of the reasons I ask is because the site does work well, and apart from the administrative tools, it’s well done! The admin does completely suck. It’s a canned CMS thing that plugs into a website as a class and the end user gets to pop in some calls like <%=thisclass.toString(’someVariable’)%> and have it correspond to a text field in the admin tool. Not a bad idea, but definitely not impressive, nor is it easy for the end-user to manipulate if they’re not technically inclined.

As it turns out, it’s cheaper for me to re-code the site and include a custom CMS than it is to pay the company who wrote the site to make modifications. I need to attract *their* clients - and then charge 50% less :-)

Before you ask… no, the client is not interested in modifying the site code. They don’t even want to make their own design changes. My guess is someone put a bug in their ear that PHP was better than JSP or something. I’m not going to ask, however, because I most certainly don’t want to talk myself out of a job! I am going to do this site using XSLT, however, just in case they decide they want to make design changes they’ll be able to without having to see any real code. The only fundamental difference between their old site and their new site is that it’ll be MVC-compliant with no appreciable (if any) code intermingled with the views.

Whelp, back to work for me…