Validating user input should be a fundamental requirement, at both the front end and the back end. Failure to do so can result in something more than an embarrassment, and relying on any development framework to do the cleanup is wishful thinking. Here are some code snippets that will eliminate inadvertently erroneous or deliberately malicious user input, as well as sloppy coding deep within the framework de jour.
Use Windows XP Pro instead.
This is America and the customer is King! Most companies work hard to make sure the Kings always come back. Except software companies, who often treat their customers as benighted captives.
It’s often said that a company’s star producers would not make it through the HR filtering. Technical talent can become invisible due to its own set of hurdles that have to be jumped.
Flash’s ubiquity is in its presence on the vast majority of PC desktops, laptops and netbooks. It is also in a surprising, and growing, percentage of mobile devices. Software developers who want to tap this rapidly expanding market face many challenges that have not existed in the PC world for quite some time. Here is a book that is virtually encyclopedic in its review of the pitfalls and dangers for mobile development and how they can be avoided, even for the iPhone. It provides rich information detail on how to address mobile software development now, along with a preview of how it can be done easier when what is in the oven finishes baking.
Software is not the only thing that gets changed with scant attention to prior art. Even staid and tangible products can confuse established users when replacement time comes.
Using encapsulated components instead of reinventing wheels in code have been around from some time, for both GUI elements and nonvisible functional blocks such as communications protocol handlers. Here is a brief sampler of some for Adobe’s Flex 3 development tool.
Twitter was an accidental tool built to solve an internal business problem. It took a while for the builders to realize that it was really a product itself that other businesses could use. Here are some specific real world examples of how some business have used it.
The high fixed costs of Mergenthaler linotype, rotary presses and distribution systems were eliminated by cold type, and few regret the change. But the cold type systems have their own fixed costs that only get higher, which has surprised many in the publishing industry as it struggles for survival.
Software development may well be the closest activity to perpetual motion that can be achieved in the real world. Approaches and techniques once thought new are more often than not a bad solution to an old problem. Cascading Style Sheets is one of those ancient wheels badly reinvented.
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