I probably shouldn’t post about my work here but since I’m only going to be here until the end of the summer and I won’t state explicitly where it is I work, I figure I’m relatively safe. My department is devising a search engine with user-editable fields for the businesses found in the search. Combining wiki and search engine but in a really lame way that’s not really a wiki so much as it’s editable fields.

We’re early going in the process right now but I have a huge problem with the way the system interacts with the user database. Essentially, we have a database of users and then we have a site which needs to access that database to add new users, change passwords, log in users, and all those fun things. What’s the problem? My boss wants the whole fucking site to interact with the database through a web service API!

We already have a User class with all the goodies required to do all the stuff we need and we could access that in a very smart way, but then instead of having one middleman to work through we have two! We talk to the web service – through completely open HTTP request! – which talks to the API which talks to the database. Not only is adding in the web service unnecessary but it opens huge holes in the system.

I understand that he wants this to be open to having various other systems all connecting to this but have a simple web service API to access the User class but use the real User class in the actual business logic the main site uses. Otherwise the web service has to have way too many capabilities for something that anybody in the world can access and operate.