Saturday, December 24, 2005
Retaining defensive programming in Web 2.0
What's the use of a gift certificate if you don't know how to use it? My boss was nice enough to give me a Amazon gift certificate after she as unsuccessful at finding a current sports almanac at any of the local bookstores. I jumped on a few minutes ago and ordered copies of a Ruby on Rails programming title and John Battelle's "The Search".
Thinking I was knowing what I was doing (first mistake), I copied the gift cert code to my clipboard and proceeded to checkout. Too fast, evidently, as I whizzed through the process so fast that I didn't change the payment method and charged the whole thing to my credit card. Oops. Fortunately, Im able to go in and edit the order in a few minutes before it gets charged, bringing Thank God for Amazon having the foresight that there would be idiots like me.
That's the kind of defensive programming that needs to not fall by the wayside in Web 2.0 applications. I see more and more developers getting so caught up in the AJAX hype and creating web services to expose public APIs and throwing up RSS feeds en masse that they're neglecting a key and fundamental tenet of any type of software development: don't assume your users will be absolutely coherent in navigating and using your application.
The new functionality brought about by the next evolution of the Web is going to greatly improve the online experience, no doubt, but it's also going to introduce a whole new set of problems due to user confusion.
Or in my case, just basic human stupidity.
Thinking I was knowing what I was doing (first mistake), I copied the gift cert code to my clipboard and proceeded to checkout. Too fast, evidently, as I whizzed through the process so fast that I didn't change the payment method and charged the whole thing to my credit card. Oops. Fortunately, Im able to go in and edit the order in a few minutes before it gets charged, bringing Thank God for Amazon having the foresight that there would be idiots like me.
That's the kind of defensive programming that needs to not fall by the wayside in Web 2.0 applications. I see more and more developers getting so caught up in the AJAX hype and creating web services to expose public APIs and throwing up RSS feeds en masse that they're neglecting a key and fundamental tenet of any type of software development: don't assume your users will be absolutely coherent in navigating and using your application.
The new functionality brought about by the next evolution of the Web is going to greatly improve the online experience, no doubt, but it's also going to introduce a whole new set of problems due to user confusion.
Or in my case, just basic human stupidity.
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