Design considerations
The recent explosive growth of application-oriented software delivered as a service over the Web makes implementing effective guidelines for your project critically important. Careful planning of design activities can help ensure the success of your project.
Before you start your development, carefully consider the following guidelines:
- Task and user analysis - Consider what tasks you want to your end-users to perform before you start your project. Using the elements supplied by your schema files and the configuration properties of your XML file, you can control the level of access your users have to Studio and its functions. For example, by defining an endpoint for your users, you can limit or increase the number of activities they can add to their orchestrations. It's also important to understand how your end-users perform their tasks. Providing them with information in the order they are likely to require it will help your project integrate smoothly and will result in a unified user experience.
- Naming conventions - Sometimes, when working on a project with tight deadlines, it's tempting to label the components of an application hurriedly. For example, when designing your endpoint panel, you may be inclined to define a 'type' field quickly so that you can move on to more important functional tasks. However, the benefits of intuitive naming practices are often not evident until later, when users are confronted with arbitrary and confusing naming schemes. Remember, once deployed, your connector will be used again and again, so be sure to utilize logical, consistent and intuitive naming conventions.
Before you begin
Before you begin your project, collect the following information. Having it accessible will make your development process go more smoothly:
- Connection fields - Be prepared to specify the connection field details you'll need to connect to your endpoints, such as name and type.
- Input activities - Determine which of your input activities will be discovered dynamically at design time and which will be static.
- Input and output data types - Be prepared to indicate which input and output data types will be supported by each of your activities.