Tag Archives: mashup

Usability of Web Business Tools, Research on the Missing link

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Ben Kepes from CloudAve recently wrote Is There a sweet spot for features? about usability issues in web applications offering more and more features everyday.

As he states:

It’s easy as pie to create a good looking and intuitive user experience when your solution only includes a few functional areas, but as you roll out further functionality all of a sudden that simplicity and intuitive feel starts to lose out to nested menus, complexity and options.

In my opinion, you have to solve two main issues:

  1. How do you combine keeping it simple for users with simple needs with offering a complete solution to power users.
  2. How do you display and browse your data, especially when the amount of features becomes huge.

Before going further, I encourage you to watch our first video about the BeeBole interface and features illustrating a few of the points discussed here.

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Sandbox Your Cross Domain JSONP To Improve Mashup Security

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JSONP is a very neat way to get JSON data from other domains. The concept was brought by Bob Ipolito in 2005, and today it is widely available from API providers.

The big issue about JSONP is security. If you inject an unknown script in your page, you give to the script author a potential way to read the entire page content, scripts, cookies and data.

So, if you think, like us, the cool way to build web apps today is about building services and aggregating them with external APIs in Mashups, you have a problem. How can we securely fetch these nice services available everywhere?

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SaaS Startup Creation – BeeBole Technology Choices

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An important part in the creation process of a new SaaS offer is of course about technology choices.

You need to choose a language for your back-end, for the front-end, you need a DataBase, you might want to develop everything on an existing platform, …

In some extent, you may even want your technological choices to mirror a certain corporate philosophy.

In the coming weeks, Mic and Hughes will share with you some technical posts about our findings, thoughts and decisions.

We don’t have the pretense of coming out with an absolute winner for each choice that we make. In fact, we think there is no such thing. Each technology has its pros and cons and even those might change depending on the context.
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Can everyone be a software developer?

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I came across this article this morning. Iceberg comes with an interesting platform allowing everyone to create web applications with “zero code”. Looking at the market, you can find other competitors such as Coghead, Longjump, BungeeLabs, WyaWorks or Zoho.

There is something striking me in all the video presentations I have seen on those web sites, it is the complexity for any normal user. There is indeed the “zero code” approach but you still need to understand what is a web service, that those web services have variables or that you can link those with workflows.

There are a lot of good ideas but I don’t see the point for the following reasons…

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