Author: agup

New Developers – don’t use shorthand code!

Our team is increasingly working with folks who don’t have a developer background. So, I’ve been spending time providing tips-and-tricks on some of the basics they’ll need to help them over their first few speeds bumps.

The first thing I always stress is learning how to debug. It’s imperative to know how to do it well, and if you don’t know how to do it then you’ll hate programming forever. It’s just like swimming. If your first experience is bad you may never jump back in the water again. But if you learn to do it right the first time, you are more likely to try it again and again. And, you may even find yourself having fun with it.

One of the fundamentals of debugging is writing verbose code. Those of us who have been doing it a while tend to cut corners sometimes, and we write things in shorthand like this:        

 if(something == 0) return false;

The problem with this line of code is very hard to debug. The recommended best practice is to write the code as such:        

if(something == 0)
{
     return false;
}

This enables three things to happen. First, you can set the debugger on the “return” line. This means you can check to see if the “if” condition actually occurred or not. Second, if there is ever an error you’ll know exactly which line it occurred on without having to decipher which part of your shorthand code caused the problem. This will save you time and headaches. And lastly, it’s much easier to read, especially when your programs start to get large.

So, my recommendation is to “spell it out”!

Major public web sites miss the mark on using advanced web technology

As a developer I notice things about web sites that the average person wouldn’t think twice about. I also know that the level of technology that’s available to build user interfaces is well beyond what we had in the early 2000’s. And, the ability to build amazing, user-centric interfaces is as easy as ever. But, I’m always perplexed that most major web sites today incorporate very little of this technology in their full functionality web pages.

So, I’ve been doing an informal survey for the past month and my list includes major news sites, airline web sites and retailers. The vast majority of them aren’t much easier to use than they were five years ago with a great a selection of hyperlinks, tabs and full page refreshes. For the fun of it I decided to travel back in time using an internet time machine call the Wayback Machine and compare some of these sites to their predecessors. I challenge you to do the same.

I have a few suspicions as to why this is happening, or not happening as the case may be. First, plug-in based technology such as Adobe Flex and Microsoft Silverlight typically require some amount of time to load the initial payload into the browser. Sometimes you can create highly optimized or lazy-load packages, but it challenging. It’s rare to find one of these apps that load in the sub-second timeframe required in today’s hyper-competitive environment. The general impression is that the longer your page takes to load, the fewer the visitors you will have. So most major websites code is mostly made up of HTML, JavaScript, jQuery and CSS which most browsers have gotten really, really good at parsing extremely fast.

Second, it’s challenging to build Flex and Silverlight websites so that web crawlers can read text-based content. This seems fairly academic. If you can’t effectively index the content of your site, then potential visitors can’t search it via external search engines such as Bing and Google. Period.

These two items alone may explain why visually spectacular interfaces are limited to small portions of most public websites such as video plug-ins, or just specific sections of a much larger website. Where these more advanced interfaces typically reside are in back office applications where functionality trumps the need for millisecond application load times. There are some very cool exceptions for consumer apps such as the end-user experiences shown Mini Cooper’s build your own car online website. Yet, unfortunately for us as consumers, these are few and far between as consumer companies cater to the vast hunger for ever faster page load times.

The good news for advanced web technology in consumer apps is I’m seeing a large opening with mobile deployments. The plug-in technologies now have the capability to allow you to deliver visually enticing experiences across a wide array of devices. And this can be done, for the most part, without the tedium of worrying about all the vast nuances of different browser types and versions. Plus there is a bonus: the application is manually loaded and ready to go on your device minus the on-device load time when you turn on the app. I’m seeing some really innovative uses of the technology in what I call focused solutions, or applications built for a very specific purpose. Unfortunately most are in commercial beta and I can’t link to them. But, you’ll see them soon in an online marketplace right at your fingertips.

References:

Mobile Development with Adobe Flex 4.5

Silverlight for Windows Phone

Flex.org Showcase

Study: Consumers abandon slow loading websites (April 2010)

Let’s make the web faster (Google, May 2010)

Browser updates…too many too fast?

We’ve finally reached the point where the number of browser updates is out of control. There’s an all-out war between the various browser companies to see who can push out the most updates and improvements in the shortest period of time.

All these updates are causing a ripple effect on everything else that is dependent on the browser; for example, plug-in vendors, IT support staff, computer and smart phone vendors, application developers, any company that has a website, and your average consumer.  I’m guessing that on average the pace of updates is starting to outpacing business and consumer’s ability to keep up…and it seems to be accelerating.

Yes, I wholeheartedly agree we benefit from the advancements. No argument there. However that is balanced by reality. And, reality is architecting our products to support the latest and greatest. There is also the fact that most of us also have to maintain support for older versions of browsers and there is a cost associated with backward compatibility. And, there is a cost to upgrading. Not everyone is able to update all the time.

As a case in point, let’s take a look at Firefox since it’s fairly easy to find an archive of their older releases. We are only seven months into the year 2011 and Firefox has had two major releases: Firefox 4 and Firefox 5. However, if you include releases candidates, betas and updates to Firefox 3.x the total number climbs to around twenty-two releases so far this year. Yikes!

Sure, most consumers only saw the two major updates: Firefox 4 and Firefox 5. But, they also experience a plethora of plug-in updates. For example, Flash Player has had eight updates so far this year. Silverlight has had three general distribution releases this year and one beta release of Silverlight 5. And, I wasn’t counting but it seems like I’ve had a bunch of Adobe Reader updates in the last few months.

My concern is that the speed of browser innovation is starting to cause businesses and consumers to get fatigued. It begs the question: how long can the ecosystem of browser consumers maintain this pace? Or, at what point do people just start jumping off the bandwagon and simply starting skipping releases? Do most consumers really care if their browser is now 100ms faster in parsing JavaScript? How many new ways can we create tabs?

In summary, I think browser vendors should slow down and become better custodians of their systems. How about also focusing on innovation in security, memory leaks and best practices documentation and vendor-provided validation engines? Indeed, they have sparked tremendous innovation across the entire world wide web since Mosaic released in 1993. But, depending on how many websites you visit, you can still experience slow web pages, in-consistent cross-browser support and browser crashes. I know there are no easy answers because competition breeds creativity. Perhaps we’ll all go back to just looking at basic text, pictures and videos in the future. And, there will just be specific widgets with very focused functionality for other things.

References:

Flash Player Archive

Firefox Archive

Silverlight Release History