On Thu, Feb 25, 2010 at 1:28 PM, vivpuri <[email protected]> wrote:
> First, it is a facebook issue

No, it is NOT a Facebook issue.  It's an issue with any system that
relies on cookies or third-party code that is sensitive to domain.  It
just happens to be a particularly nasty problem with Facebook.

I want to deploy my beta code to appengine and test it *with no other
changes whatsoever*.  If you take testing seriously, you want this as
well.

Forcing beta testers to use XX.latest.example.appspot.com presents an
entirely new set of cookies to the system.  It's not a question of "go
to this new URL and see what happens", it's "go to this new URL, log
in again, get back to the same UI state you were in, and hope that the
original problem wasn't caused by cookies that are now masked".

> Second, you can create a tmp facebook app for testing that points to
> the versioned appengine app. Still debugging for existing users is a
> pain. It would be better that facebook let you point app to a sandbox
> server/url

This adds *yet another* variable to the testing process, and quite a
dangerous one at that.  For different applications:

 * The app settings in facebook might be different depending on what
engineer was testing that day

 * The social graph of "friends who have installed your app" are
wildly different

 * Data you have persisted in Facebook for the user (using their data
apis) is totally different.

 * If you record information based on these last two points, you can
easily trash your live data.

Of course Facebook could *partially* solve this problem by allowing a
second domain for testing. But this still doesn't solve the cookie
issues.  It would be *far* better for developers if we could visit two
urls, sharing cookies but running different code:

http://www.example.com
http://XX.latest.example.com

Jeff

-- 
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups 
"Google App Engine" group.
To post to this group, send email to [email protected].
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to 
[email protected].
For more options, visit this group at 
http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine?hl=en.

Reply via email to