Re: Code generation or forms?

On Jun 14, 2005, at 12:33 AM, Paul Downey wrote:

>
> On 13 Jun 2005, at 23:16, Jan Algermissen wrote:
>
>>>
>>> I go to buy a book from Amazon, fill in their form, but then realise
>>> i left my credit card at the office. An hour later, back from work
>>> I complete the form. If in the meantime Amazon change the service
>>> in an incompatible way, my request will fail.
>>>
>>
>> Incompatible with WHAT????
>>
>
> If the service suddenly expects the client to send the
> credit card number using a different parameter name,
> or starts rejecting country codes of "uk" then that would be
> an incompatible change and the client would fail, regardless
> if it's a form or a generated Python stub.

I disagree. Given you leave your browser when it is in some state X
of the purchase order app that tells you that the param name is A and  
that
Amazon changes the Web app to require the param name to be B. When  
you send the
'outdated' form (== perform the outdated state transition) Amazon can  
have provided
for this case and silently translate your state transition to the  
required new one
without you noticing.

And it is exactly the decoupling of application and consumer that  
allows amazon to
handle such cases and not loose a purchase.

The extreme at the other end would be you having received an  
executable from amazon
some time ago with the application semantics hard coded. You would do  
the purchase and
after you return the purchase would just fail with Amazon telling you  
to doenload a new
executable.


Jan



>
> --
> http://blog.whatfettle.com
>
>

________________________________________________________________________ 
____________________
Jan Algermissen, Consultant & Programmer                              
http://jalgermissen.com
Tugboat Consulting, 'Applying Web technology to enterprise IT'        
http://www.tugboat.de

Received on Monday, 13 June 2005 22:43:35 UTC