Category Archives: Web

Web

The Long Tail of Transactions

So there’s a rumour Amazon will be offering a payment service to compete with PayPal. I think a pre-cursor (perhaps test run?) of that is their DevPay service for Amazon WS developers, built on the existing Flexible Payments Service (FPS). I’ve been looking forward to seeing Amazon do this. The FPS is more intrinsically interesting for developers, but it makes sense for Amazon as a company to take a piece of the “long tail of transactions.” If anyone can match PayPal at this, Amazon should be the one.

The Web Bores Me

I have to face the facts: I’m completely bored of writing web apps. I’m not bored by the architecture of the Web, which I believe should be leveraged more than it currently is; but sometimes I really don’t think I can face the grind and hassle of assembling what should be a simple web application or web service. Let’s face it: it’s so freaking dull. And so much harder than it should be. I read somewhere (unfortunately, I can’t remember where) that the most complex aspect of any enterprise web development project is AJAX. I can believe it easily. Add a pile of enterprise middleware suckage plus associated crappy tools and it’s ten times more disheartening.

So I’m learning Cocoa. Gonna see what I can do with desktop apps that speak Web. At least it’ll be different. And cross-platform capability be damned (for the moment, at least.) Then who knows? Maybe it’s time to take distributed computing to the iPhone :)

I suppose it’s no wonder I’m more comfortable writing middleware. It’s hard, but at least it’s not hard and terminally boring. (YMMV.)