On Thu, Oct 8, 2009 at 10:11, Ian Boston <i...@tfd.co.uk> wrote: > 1. The URL space is part of the UI and "owned" by the User, UX Designer, UI > developer. > 2. Imposing a convention on that URL space for the affordances of the back > end causes just the problem that you are concerned about. Now the UI > developer needs to know the internals of how to structure those URLs to > achieve scalability. > ... > BTW, a UI developer does not write Java code. They use the REST interfaces, > they might write some py, esp or rb. > ... > On 1, our Users, UX Designers and UI developers are demanding URLs like > /xxxx/yy where for all instances of yy, yy is unique, and yy might be on of > 1-200K and in some instances I know of upto 4M (the 16G is an edge case but > if I break out of the Higher Ed use case there are plenty of examples of > URLs where yy is one of billions). There are two solid examples /user/eid > where eid is the institutional ID and /site/siteid where site ID the name of > the Site, eg physics101. > ... > On 2. If we have to communicate how to structure the URL to UI developers > for storage, then it hardly matters what the scheme is, we have to > communicate it. An algorithm that says formatTime(now,"/{YYYY}/{MM}/{DD}/") > is almost as simple as formatSha1(pathInfo,"/{01}/{23}/{45}/{67}") but I > cant ask the UI developer to to do either. This is not to say that they > might not decide to structure the URL in a semantic form, and I would > encourage them to do so, but they always come back to the case where there > is a user generated URL space that will have > 10K items at yy.
IMHO the content structure is a critical part of the system (at least on the technical side), so I would involve a developer with knowledge and experience about the "underlying" repository and content modeling whenever a new URL space is created by some application. Or teach the UI developers about content modeling and provide them with simple APIs to avoid flat or hash-based hierarchies. Regards, Alex -- Alexander Klimetschek alexander.klimetsc...@day.com