[TriLUG] Question about webapp design philosophy

[Andrew Perrin]

I think the reason not to do it is that embedding lots of logic in one
program makes the program difficult to change, maintain, and modularize.

Which is not to say it's not a good idea, just that I would expect that to
be the downside.

I haven't studied eBay either, but for some of the online survey work I've
been doing my strategy is similar to what you're saying. The key
difference is that I pipe an identifier to the script (in perl) and make
PostgreSQL do all the work, so I'm not in the position of hard-coding lots
of HTML into one big script.

Andy

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Andrew J Perrin - http://www.unc.edu/~aperrin
Assistant Professor of Sociology, U of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
clists at perrin.socsci.unc.edu * andrew_perrin (at) unc.edu


On Sun, 8 Sep 2002, Mike Helms wrote:

> Hi everyone,
> 
> I've been studying ebay (as best as one can study ebay just by looking at
> it), and it appears that many of the pages in ebay are generated from the
> same "page" on their webserver.  There is a variable passed through the URL
> that acts, in effect, like a "command" to the page, telling it what we are
> trying to do.  When I go to the My Ebay page, the command is
> MyEbayItemsBiddingOn.  When I view an item, it is ViewItem.
> 
> This makes sense, as it means there wouldn't be dozens, if not hundreds or
> even thousands of separate pages to maintain in the website.  In effect, you
> could have one tremendously large page that would actually comprise the
> entire website.  If nothing else, this would save on repetition.
> 
> Is there a reason not to do this?  I'm laying the groundwork now for a new
> webapp that I'm going to build, and this has certainly given me cause to
> rethink my design philosophy.
> 
> Cheers,
> -- Mike Helms
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