Sol Young

We’ve recently done work harnessing our iofy RESTful web services in JavaScript, especially the account management sections. Typically, in old-school fashion, an account management system is done server side with PHP, PERL, Ruby, etc, interacting with a database.

<sarcasm>That’s great when you want your heavy hitting developers to do design work or when you want your designers to do low-level work (or if you want to add a layer of management to your project where you need to separate out what parts of a page are owned by what developer/designer.)</sarcasm>

Why give yourself that headache? I had that headache for a while and have a direct solution. REST + JavaScript. My heavy hitters delivered RESTful functionality for our API that can be harnessed by pretty much anything capable of HTTP. My webmaster and designers can now, purely in JavaScript, harness this API and deliver all the functionality they need with all the gorgeous style they possess.

You can too (drop us a note and sign up as a reseller.) Our API is REST and we’ve got JavaScript libraries for harnessing it. The JavaScript queries the web service and receives an RSS 2.0 response. Parse it, and you’ve got everything you need for account management, content delivery, sales, and reporting.

Now for the difficulty in JavaScript web service API harnessing… The big surprise we ran in to initially was with the failure rate of HTTP requests from client-side JavaScript calls. DNS stinks. We would make requests and randomly get failures. As it turns out, DNS will fail between 1% and 3% of the time on a typical DSL connection. You need to retry that connection…

I recommend the three-peat for failed connections. In your JavaScript (or any other language), use asynchronous calls to a function which will repeat the HTTP request up to three times before erroring out. This reduces the likelihood of failure to a cube of the failure rate.

The worst DNS providers fail 3% of the time. Therefore the first request has a 3% chance of failure. The second has 0.09% chance since the 3% that failed are 3% likely to fail again (3% multiplied by another 3%.) The third try won’t fail unless something bigger is going wrong, drops the chance to 0.0027%. This is far more acceptable than 3 in 100 and effectively removes the DNS issue of web service connections.