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Category: Web

Posts related to web development.

Getting Healthcare.gov to Handle 50,000 Users

Healthcare.gov, the US Government’s health insurance exchange website for states that didn’t provide their own, was supposed to handle about 50,000 to 60,000 simultaneous users. Unless you have been living under a rock, you know what a complete disaster the website as been. But it didn’t (and doesn’t) have to be that way.

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Secure Web App Login Screens

More and more customers are using Xojo to create applications that may contain private end-user information. This means that it’s becoming increasingly important that your web applications be protected with an SSL certificate and some kind of authentication to make sure the user is who they claim to be.

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WebSessionContext Changes in 2013

If you use WebSessionContext in your Xojo web projects, you’re probably aware by now that they’re not working very well. I thought I’d take a few minutes to tell you what’s going on and how we’re planning to fix it.

What is a WebSessionContext anyway?

First of all, a quick description of what WebSessionContext is supposed to do for you. WebSessionContext is a mechanism for accessing a particular existing WebSession from within an area of your application that would otherwise not know where it belongs. These include Threads, Timers, System Events, App Events, etc. Normally you could tell because you would get a SessionNotAvailableException when trying to access a particular WebSession in your code.

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More Important Than Ever: Cross-Platform’s History

There was a time when the idea of running the same code on different computers wasn’t even imagined. Programming languages were written specifically for a particular computer. And computers were purchased for very specific purposes so why would you even want to run a particular program on another type of computer?

It was the desktop computer revolution that changed that. By the mid-to-late 1980’s, there were more and more desktop computers and developers wanted to target all of them. Soon, however, Windows became so dominant that many developers chose to focus on that one OS. Some Mac developers, not wanting to miss out on the potentially enormous Windows market, either went to the trouble of writing two versions of their applications or used a tool/language that would allow them to target both Mac and Windows from a single code base. This was the beginning of cross-platform development.

Recently, I was asked by tech blogger Chris Pirillo if cross-platform was really important anymore. Cross-Platform is actually more important than ever. Why? First of all, while the Windows PC market is seeing flat or declining sales, Apple’s Mac marketshare is growing. We are seeing this at Xojo. More and more Windows developers are coming to us because they can no longer ignore the Mac market. Linux is the predominant server OS. If you want to write server software that can run on some combination of Linux, Windows and OS X, you’ll want to be writing cross-platform code.

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