Andrew Pollack's Blog
Technology, Family, Entertainment, Politics, and Random Noise| Professional Services | Second Signal | Presentations | Andrew's Blog | Support |
What is the root of your application?
By Andrew Pollack on 06/25/2008 at 10:43 PM EDTI got stuck a bit today. It took me getting out of the programming tools and back to paper to get myself unstuck. By diving into code too soon, I'd painted myself into a corner without understanding the nature of the problem. It took more thought and less code to solve the riddle.
Now that I've got some really powerful tools to play with, I'm having to think about things I never did before. For example, where does an application's data begin? A user hits my XPage and that user is new. There's no profile. Do I pre-create one for them to act as a jumping off point? That seems to be the standard out there. The minute you arrive at any site where you'll be creating data, you're asked to sign up and sign in. They do that because they want to have something as a "ROOT" level on which to base all that data you generate.
I'm a big fan of putting the user profile outside the application in its own database, easily keyed on the userid --Store only global stuff there. Things that won't change from application to application. That gives you a system wide platform on which to build your various application specific data.
When you're stuck, give more thought to architecture, and less to the act of coding.
Other Recent Stories...
- 01/26/2023Better Running VirtualBox or VMWARE Virtual Machines on Windows 10+ Forgive me, Reader, for I have sinned. I has been nearly 3 years since my last blog entry. The truth is, I haven't had much to say that was worthy of more than a basic social media post -- until today. For my current work, I was assigned a new laptop. It's a real powerhouse machine with 14 processor cores and 64 gigs of ram. It should be perfect for running my development environment in a virtual machine, but it wasn't. VirtualBox was barely starting, and no matter how many features I turned off, it could ......
- 04/04/2020How many Ventilators for the price of those tanks the Pentagon didn't even want?This goes WAY beyond Trump or Obama. This is decades of poor planning and poor use of funds. Certainly it should have been addressed in the Trump, Obama, Bush, Clinton, Bush, and Reagan administrations -- all of which were well aware of the implications of a pandemic. I want a military prepared to help us, not just hurt other people. As an American I expect that with the ridiculous funding of our military might, we are prepared for damn near everything. Not just killing people and breaking things, but ......
- 01/28/2020Copyright Troll WarningThere's a copyright troll firm that has automated reverse-image searches and goes around looking for any posted images that they can make a quick copyright claim on. This is not quite a scam because it's technically legal, but it's run very much like a scam. This company works with a few "clients" that have vast repositories of copyrighted images. The trolls do a reverse web search on those images looking for hits. When they find one on a site that looks like someone they can scare, they work it like ......
- 03/26/2019Undestanding how OAUTH scopes will bring the concept of APPS to your Domino server
- 02/05/2019Toro Yard Equipment - Not really a premium brand as far as I am concerned
- 10/08/2018Will you be at the NYC Launch Event for HCL Domino v10 -- Find me!
- 09/04/2018With two big projects on hold, I suddenly find myself very available for new short and long term projects.
- 07/13/2018Who is HCL and why is it a good thing that they are now the ones behind Notes and Domino?
- 03/21/2018Domino Apps on IOS is a Game Changer. Quit holding back.
- 02/15/2018Andrew’s Proposed Gun Laws
wouldn't be in a traditional app? I'm not arguing with your point, but I think
you've taken a logic leap that some of your readers might not follow.
The interesting thing, to me, about what XPages bring isn't so much the "what"
as the "why" - why do I do something a particular way in a tool where I have a
zillion options, and why does this tool change the way I think of the app to
begin with. Note to self: remind IBM to answer those questions before they go
Gold with this...