Software Engineering for Internet Applications - Student Community

{site url}{site description}en-usCopyright {dates}{rfc822 date}{your emailaddr}{rfc822 date}{item1 title}{description foritem1}{guid for item1}{rfc822 date for when item1went live}262item2}went live}{item2 title}{description for{guid for item2}{rfc822 date for when item2Remember to escape any markup in your titles and descriptions, sothat, for example, Whoa! becomes<em>Whoa!</em>.14.11 More• http://www.soapware.org/bdg -- A Busy Developer's Guideto SOAP• http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/library/wssoap/?dwzone=components#2-- Using WSDL in SOAPApplications (An introduction to WSDL for SOAPprogrammers)SOAP implementations:• Apache SOAP (in Java) at http://xml.apache.org/soap/• PHP: NuSOAP (http://dietrich.ganx4.com/nusoap/) andPEAR::SOAP(http://www.phppatterns.com/index.php/article/articleview/39)5.8 Multi-Page Design and FlowThis book defers discussion of individual page design until theContent Management chapter but we need to think about page flowdesign right now. Why? The bad design of a single page will offend auser; the bad design of the page-to-page flow of a site will defeat auser.One of the things that users love about the Web is the way in whichcomputation is discretized. A desktop application is generally acomplex miasma in which the state of the project is only partiallyvisible. Despite software vendors having added multiple-level Undocommands to many popular desktop programs, the state of thoseprograms remains opaque to users.The first general principle of multi-page design is therefore Don'tbreak the browser's Back button. Users should be able to goforward and back at any time in their session with a site. Forexample, consider the following flow of pages on a shopping site:• choose a book• enter shipping address• enter credit card number• confirm• thank-youA user who notices a typo in the shipping address on the confirmpage should be able to return to the shipping address entry form withthe Back button or the "click right" menu attached to the Back button,correct the address and proceed from there. See the "Choosingbetween GET and POST" section later in this chapter.A second general principle is Have users pick the object first andthen the verb. For example, consider the customer service area ofan ecommerce site. Assume that Jane Consumer has alreadyidentified herself to the server. The merchant can show Jane a list ofall the items that she has ever purchased. Jane clicks on an item(picking the object) and gets a page with a list of choices, e.g.,"return for refund" or "exchange". Jane clicks on "exchange" (pickingthe verb) and gets a page with instructions on how to schedule apickup of the unwanted item and pages offering replacement goods.How original is this principle? It is lifted straight from the AppleMacintosh circa 1984 and is explicated clearly in Macintosh Human87