Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: My experiences writing Joel on Software

Author:Brent Simmons
Posted:5/10/2000; 3:59:05 PM
Topic:My experiences writing Joel on Software
Msg #:17184 (In response to 17181)
Prev/Next:17183 / 17185

Another kind of small issue is that the bulletin feature seems to be synchronous... you don't get the HTTP result back until all 200 emails have gone out. This just doesn't scale. I'm afraid that if I have too many members, I'll get a timeout and only the top ones on the list will get the bulletin. (I may be totally wrong on this. Correct me if I am.) A better architecture might be for the send bulletin command to "spawn a thread" that sends the bulletins later.

Because of the way HTTP works, you are in fact spawning a thread on the server when you send bulletins. That thread on the server does not die if your browser breaks the connection -- not until the server attempts to return data and fails. But it does not attempt to return data until the bulletins have been sent.

In other words, you could click the Send button, then go surf somewhere else if you don't want to wait for confirmation. The bulletins will still go out.

Some of our bulletins lists are in the thousands of members, and we use the Manila bulletins feature. Waiting for confirmation is boring, but it works.

About browser-based editing -- are you using IE 5 for Windows? Do you see the JavaScript HTML menu above text areas?

About saving your work to a private place -- you could write in the dg, saving frequently, and when it's ready promote it to a story via the Admin box. Unless people are checking your dg constantly, they won't see the story until it's ready. You can even make your dg private, if it's not in use as a forum, which it doesn't appear to be.

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