I too obsess over shorter URLs but I do love the idea that the whole state is just a URL. From the comments, use good enough defaults and URL shorteners where necessary, and it's a brilliant design for a free-tier application.
How to store your app's entire state in the url
331–340 of 416 posts
Re: How to store your app's entire state in the url
#332I saw a $12 million app have to be essentially rewritten (at a bank) The “genius dev lead who went to Princeton” kept pushing that they went to Princeton so people stopped arguing against it Tried to do this securely and got pwned in the very first demo
I mean, they got pwned because they didn't validate the state against the current user's session. Not because storing state in the URL is insecure.
How can you secure state stored in the URL?
Re: How to store your app's entire state in the url
#333I'm not into web "programming", but do people really have to abndon binary data storage these days? I think compressing more informaiton produces still more information. While JSON is by no means as heavy as, for example, XML, it's far heavier than just array of int graph[x][y];
> I'm not into web "programming" Elaborate
I write performance-critical code where it is normal to count bits, not just bytes, and keep track of number of instructions generated by your code. The whole web thing where people shove everything into a browser is just weird to me.
Re: How to store your app's entire state in the url
#334I'm not into web "programming", but do people really have to abndon binary data storage these days? I think compressing more informaiton produces still more information. While JSON is by no means as heavy as, for example, XML, it's far heavier than just array of int graph[x][y];
To put it into a url, you'll still need to serialize to text, even if the underlying data is binary.
yup. data > gzip > UU/B64/URL-encode > text.
Re: How to store your app's entire state in the url
#335App state in URL can be a good idea, but if possible I prefer readable path/query parameters instead of unreadable base64 encoding. As one comparison, this is Google Finance encoding stock chart parameters: https://www.google.com/finance/quote/F:NYSE?window=5Y Versus Yahoo! Finance doing the same: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/F/chart?p=F#eyJpbnRlcnZhbCI6IndlZWsiLCJwZXJpb2RpY2l0eSI6MSwidGltZVVuaXQiOm51bGwsImNhbmRsZ…
Here is it decoded: {"interval":"week","periodicity":1,"timeUnit":null,"candleWidth":4.3486590038314175,"flipped":false,"volumeUnderlay":true,"adj":true,"crosshair":true,"chartType":"line","extended":false,"marketSessions":{},"aggregationType":"ohlc","chartScale":"linear","studies":{" vol undr ":{"type":"vol undr","inputs":{"id":" vol undr ","display":" vol undr "},"outputs":{"Up Volume":"#00b061","Down Volume":"#ff3…
What is the point of the encoding ? Is it obfuscation for the common user ? What's wrong with http:// url.com/api/?interval=week&periodicity=1... since the encoded version is not shorter.
Re: How to store your app's entire state in the url
#336Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unless it's still at a proof-of-concept stage, that person is out of their depth.
Yes, yes they are. Unfortunately this is dysfunctional academia, so as long as the people paying the bills (who know nothing about building software) like them, they remain at this depth. Extra fun fact: Two years into the project, they hadn't heard of REST. Then rejected it, because, I quote, "The S means stateless and [they] need the server to store state"
This is on another level! (0_0) Thank you for this example. Makes one rethink things )
Re: How to store your app's entire state in the url
#337Earlier quoted context omitted.
OT, we used to joke about LISP source code contains mostly brackets. Nowadays we literally store, transform and pass around willy nillily
I found that joke funny until I realized that, if you sum the count of round, square, angle and curly braces together, your typical piece of C++ or Java code has more brackets than equivalent piece of Lisp code...
Well yeah that's a major reason why most programmers hate LISP syntax. It uses a parentheses for everything even though every keyboard has round, square, angle and curly braces.
Re: How to store your app's entire state in the url
#338Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here is it decoded: {"interval":"week","periodicity":1,"timeUnit":null,"candleWidth":4.3486590038314175,"flipped":false,"volumeUnderlay":true,"adj":true,"crosshair":true,"chartType":"line","extended":false,"marketSessions":{},"aggregationType":"ohlc","chartScale":"linear","studies":{" vol undr ":{"type":"vol undr","inputs":{"id":" vol undr ","display":" vol undr "},"outputs":{"Up Volume":"#00b061","Down Volume":"#ff3…
What is the point of the encoding ? Is it obfuscation for the common user ? What's wrong with http:// url.com/api/?interval=week&periodicity=1... since the encoded version is not shorter.
> What is the point of the encoding ?
Absence of special characters. No need to escape symbols like {}:/\?& etc, etc.
Re: How to store your app's entire state in the url
#339Earlier quoted context omitted.
we used to joke about LISP source code contains mostly brackets. There was a programming language in the 1970's called SAM76 that didn't care how many closing parentheses you had, as long as it was more than the number of opening parentheses. So, something like this was perfectly valid: a(1+r(em(2)))))))))))))))))))
That's genious IMO. Making sure the amount of opening and closing parantheses is equal is annoying and unnecesary. It screams "trust me all good with the closing parantheses".
Interactive prompts already do that. Eg if you google "2+2)*3" it will correctly print "12". This effectively lets you append operations to an expression without editing both sides.
On the other hand, auto closing parentheses in code is a terrible idea for obvious reasons. There are only like 7 languages used in industry and they all have excellent tooling that integrates with your editor to eliminate issues like this.
Re: How to store your app's entire state in the url
#340Earlier quoted context omitted.
Here is it decoded: {"interval":"week","periodicity":1,"timeUnit":null,"candleWidth":4.3486590038314175,"flipped":false,"volumeUnderlay":true,"adj":true,"crosshair":true,"chartType":"line","extended":false,"marketSessions":{},"aggregationType":"ohlc","chartScale":"linear","studies":{" vol undr ":{"type":"vol undr","inputs":{"id":" vol undr ","display":" vol undr "},"outputs":{"Up Volume":"#00b061","Down Volume":"#ff3…
What is the point of the encoding ? Is it obfuscation for the common user ? What's wrong with http:// url.com/api/?interval=week&periodicity=1... since the encoded version is not shorter.
Encoding isn't usually to obscure but to allow using characters not allowed in a URL or wherever text is being stored. This makes it a bit easier to directly take that encoded text later and decode it into something like json.