As the content revolution has taken hold of web development, the information architecture of a website has become increasingly important. Although a site might start with twenty to fifty pages, it will need to scale to several hundred throughout its lifecycle. It’s no longer enough to create a design that elegantly accommodates the information that will be available at launch – websites must be built to scale.
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With the recent string of high-profile software project failures, from the Healthcare.gov website to the Target / Home Depot data breaches – in many cases caused by a lack of planning, understaffed teams, or underperforming project managers and architects, the field is ripe for creation of a regulatory body to provide guidance and ensure compliance to development standards. While the actual implementation of a wide-reaching government-sponsored regulatory system is still at least a decade away, the early stages of such a system are already becoming apparent in both business and technology.
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A recent paper by a researcher at the University of Maryland explores that use of crowdsourcing in text translation. Instead of requiring bilingual translators to convert books from one language to another, Google Translate was used for the bulk of the translation, with crowdsourced monolingual translators on either side to verify the text and add corrections.
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The Abstract Factory pattern, although not present in many end-user applications, finds ample grace in the development of user-configurable toolkits and frameworks. Instead of locking the developer into a particular set of controls or objects that will be used by the framework, the abstract factory instead lets developers substitute their own controls when necessary.
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What do CAD design tools, workflow automation, and digital audio synthesizers have in common? They can all benefit from the Prototype pattern in their software architecture.
Although the Prototype pattern achieves true glory in languages such as JavaScript, which base their entire class structures on Prototypes instead of traditional classes, the pattern still brings powerful functionality to C#. Its primary use is in a very specific niche: when the users of the application will perform design work, and then group those designs into reusable subcomponents.
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One of the less useful C# design patterns is the Factory Method. Primarily used for framework and toolkit development, this design pattern is rarely used in a language like C# that has templated classes, anonymous functions, interfaces, and reflection.
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The Singleton is one of the simpler design patterns. As the name suggests, the Singleton creates a single, static, globally accessible class. It is an alternative to global variables and static classes, each which come with their own limitations.
Singletons are excellent areas to store global information, such as database connection strings, system paths, and parsed XML configurations. In addition, Singletons can be used to store global image caches so that images can be shared between functions.
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Web applications often store dynamic data in folders together with the application. From WordPress to Magento, many open source apps default to intermingling the data with the application folder structure. Although this provides a simpler deployment and ease of installation for newcomers, it also provides a significant security loophole for exploit by hackers.
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One of the factors that has led to PayPal’s growth and ubiquity is their well-built API for payment processor integration. The API enables online stores to directly process credit card transactions on their websites, using PayPal as the back-end gateway for the transactions. Throughout the process, the users themselves are kept isolated from the fact that PayPal is used as the payment gateway through an intelligent and transparent API.
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YouTube offers a wealth of features for video publishing and manipulation. What makes the YouTube platform extremely powerful, however, is the ability for users to easily integrate video into any of their own, external, webpages. Through video integration, YouTube has transformed itself from simply a catalog of videos, into the largest video host on the Internet.
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