Our staff took a short break from Goldenseal Pro, the past couple weeks. Instead, we’ve been finishing up the shopping cart for SmartKnives.com. It’s almost done. A contractor did most of the work, but we needed to import inventory data, and tweak the appearance.
As app developers, it has been interesting to visit the world of e-commerce and website development. Things are very different there.
When building an app like Goldenseal Pro, programmers spend most of their time in source code. For us it’s a couple thousand text files, mostly in the C++ programming language. Some of the files are 25 years old. We make life easier by writing clean code, and adding comments to explain what’s going on. When something doesn’t work, there’s a debugger that shows what is happening, line by line. Most of the code is very well polished.
App developers also use libraries, usually written by some big entity like Microsoft or Apple. Some libraries show their source code, and some don’t. It’s always harder to work with code written by other people. It’s even harder when the source code isn’t visible. But, lots of people use the same libraries. For most problems, there usually is an answer on Stack Overflow or a developer forum.
Web development is much crazier.
It’s possible to create simple web pages by just writing some html and css text files. But, to accomplish anything complicated, programmers must use layers upon layers upon layers of other people’s code. Most of it is open-source. Most is in a state of utter chaos.
App developers occasionally make hacks- an ugly bit of code that does the job. It’s the duct tape of the programming world. Eventually we refactor them into good, solid code.
E-commerce code is almost entirely hacks. It’s an empire built entirely of duct tape. No debuggers. Lots of poorly written code that is rarely fixed. Lots of guessing.
It will be good to get back to the comfort zone of Goldenseal Pro source code. We’ll probably appreciate the Cocoa libraries more.
Dennis Kolva
Programming Director
TurtleSoft.com
