I’m sure systems can cope – but there are a number of challenges: a) System boundaries: what one system finds acceptable may not be acceptable to another (apostrophes I’m sure we’re all well aware of)
b) Unicode is probably something that older systems can’t cope with c) It wasn’t that long ago that SQL injection and XSS become hot topics – what about older GUIs written many years ago that are used by branch staff or call centre staff. Would they be able to cope? Whilst it may be poor coding, the effort required to fix the problem is immense. So saying “in this day and age I expect x” is a bit nonsensical. What’s so special about writing code today that makes effort required to remediate enterprise systems just go away? Or that makes today’s code able to handle the challenges of the next 10-20 years? Nothing as far as I’m aware. Cheers Ken From: ozdotnet-boun...@ozdotnet.com [mailto:ozdotnet-boun...@ozdotnet.com] On Behalf Of Paul Gaske Sent: Wednesday, 27 October 2010 12:29 PM To: ozDotNet Subject: Re: Rant Oh; I dunno. I'm thinking you're right to jump up and down. Especially if you've got an apostrophe in your name or a hyphenated last name. Congratulations, you're now a security risk! Seems like a bit of a fail to me. I'm sure banking systems, no matter how long ago written, would be able to handle hyphens or apostrophes. This really does sound like poor coding to me. Cheers, Paul. On Wed, Oct 27, 2010 at 2:25 PM, Stephen Price <step...@littlevoices.com<mailto:step...@littlevoices.com>> wrote: It's very easy to jump up and down about this sort of stuff when it doesn't work. Your email has made me pause and think about it, and let's be honest, this coding stuff we do is complicated. So many variable (pardon the pun), so much can go wrong. It doesn't always work as intended. If it was easy then everyone would be doing it. I know I strive to better my coding skills continually, and even after years of coding I know there will still be bugs in my code. I don't trust my own code (possibly a good trait, apparently) and use unit tests etc to help improve the code quality. It wasn't so long ago that you had to physically walk into a bank to do your banking. It's become mainstream so fast. I can see how you would jump up and down about a user having to enter their data correctly, but I guess there has to be some validation. Is there a feedback section that would allow you to let them know so they can add it to their "to be fixed" backlog? If you don't let them know (and no one else does) then you get what you put up with. I often send emails or feedback to companies when I find issues with things. It doesn't always make it to the right person but at least I tried. cheers, Stephen On Wed, Oct 27, 2010 at 12:10 PM, Ken Schaefer <k...@adopenstatic.com<mailto:k...@adopenstatic.com>> wrote: > Hi, > > > > Just because a UI is now in neat HTML doesn’t mean that every backend > system, and every other system used to access this data, can cope. > > > > I worked on Westpac’s IB upgrade project (the monitoring part) and it’s a > huge amount of work just to upgrade one small part of it. > > > > Cheers > > Ken > > > > From: ozdotnet-boun...@ozdotnet.com<mailto:ozdotnet-boun...@ozdotnet.com> > [mailto:ozdotnet-boun...@ozdotnet.com<mailto:ozdotnet-boun...@ozdotnet.com>] > On Behalf Of ben.robb...@jlta.com.au<mailto:ben.robb...@jlta.com.au> > Sent: Wednesday, 27 October 2010 9:21 AM > To: ozdotnet@ozdotnet.com<mailto:ozdotnet@ozdotnet.com> > Subject: OT: Rant > > > > <Rant> > I just ran into the following text on the Westpac Altitude Rewards web site. > I am amazed that in this day and age that the developers and/or designers > for a banking-related web site have just *given up* and are forcing their > customers to clean their data. > > Note that if your message does include any of the characters you get an > 'input error' feedback but you still have to find the offending characters > and clean it yourself. Unbelievable! > > </Rant>
