Building Web Reputation Systems

Chapter 9. Application Integration, Testing, and Tuning

If you’ve been following the steps provided in Chapters 5 through 8, you know your goals; have a diagram of your reputation model with initial calculations formulated; and have a handful of screen mock-ups showing how you will gather, display, and otherwise use reputation to increase the value of your application. You have ideas and plans, so now it is time to reduce it all to code and to start seeing how it all works together.

Integrating with Your Application

A reputation system does not exist in a vacuum; it is small machine in your larger application. There are a bunch of fine-grained connections between it and your various data sources, such as logs, event streams, identity db, entity db, and your high-performance data store. Connecting it will most likely require custom programming to connect the wires between your reputation engine and subsystems that were never connected before.

This step is often overlooked in scheduling, but it may take up a significant amount of your total project development time. There are usually small tuning adjustments that are required once the inputs are actually hooked up in a release environment. This chapter will help you understand how to plan for connecting the reputation engine to your application and what final decisions you will need to make about your reputation model.

Implementing Your Reputation Model

The heart of your new reputation-infused application is the reputation model. It’s ...