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Facebook Cookbook
book

Facebook Cookbook

by Jay Goldman
October 2008
Intermediate to advanced content levelIntermediate to advanced
434 pages
12h 7m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Facebook Cookbook

App Design Process

Problem

I’m new to the whole idea of designing applications. What process should I follow?

Solution

Ever get that feeling like you’re standing on the edge of a massive cliff and way down below you stretches an infinite plane upon which you can see large and very violent armies massing? Maybe it’s just me. I tend to get that feeling whenever I’m overlooking what amounts to a religious war with no obvious winner, be it Java versus .NET versus Ruby on Rails, dogs versus cats (although dogs are clearly superior IMHO), or software design methodologies. Wikipedia lists 16 different approaches to application design (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_development_process):

  • Waterfall model

  • Spiral model

  • Model driven development

  • User experience

  • Top-down and bottom-up design

  • Chaos model

  • Evolutionary prototyping

  • Prototyping

  • ICONIX process (UML-based object modeling with use cases)

  • Unified process

  • V-model

  • Extreme programming

  • Software development rhythms

  • Specification and description language

  • Incremental funding methodology

  • Verification and validation (software)

Most of these are overkill for your purposes, but you should take a few days out of your busy schedule and read up on them anyway. If you really are new to this and are coming at the question of methodology as pure as the driven snow, you should take the time to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the different armies before you dive into the battle.

In the end, you’ll probably find that you need a really lightweight approach that ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9780596156695Errata