Engineers Detail Extensive Efforts to Rewrite Facebook iOS App

[firewood]

I get that programming is hard. The thing is, if it is your job, wouldn't you be embarassed to have produced this garbage?

No. Sometimes barely functional garbage, delivered promptly into a sweet spot in the market, is the difference between a multi-million (or in this case billion) dollar valuation, and going bankrupt because a competitor got traction first.

Applesoft Basic was characterized as having more bugs than an African swamp. Same with Micro Soft Basic and MSDOS. The first Cisco routers. Examples abound.

The profits from the garbage dump can be used to clean up the landfill and plant a nice park.

 

[ixodes]

I still question why Apple is getting involved and "baking" Facebook into iOS.

 

[G51989]

I still question why Apple is getting involved and "baking" Facebook into iOS.

Money.

 

[ixodes]

Money.

Bravo... I believe you've nailed it.

 

[KnightWRX]

This guy told you he was a programmer and you inferred from nothing he was a client-side web developer, being wrong, as it seems.

I never inferred such a thing. You're thinking of some other poster.

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I agree that it is pretty basic. They're just taking an existing feed from Facebook and displaying it. It shouldn't have taken them years to be able to make the switch.

In the old UIWebView app they just took a feed from Facebook and displayed it. That was the point of having a HTML5 based application, that the server side code be reused accross platforms so that the "native" applications were just containers to display the HTML.

Much easier to support and port from platform to platform.

The new version however is a bit more involved. Of course, none of us know how they do it, but I'd wager they are simply using XML and translating that to native UI widgets and just rendering a custom UIView. This is a lot more involved that simply loading up a new HTML page in a UIWebView. Not only is your server side still querying your database and formatting the data in a readable format (XML through JSON in all probability instead of HTML) but now you have a lot more leg work in reinventing a client side rendering system for that formatted data.

The result is of course a great gain in speed since you have better control over the final rendering and any dynamic code blocks that need executing can be compiled directly into the application and just called through Objective-C's message passing (NSInvocation or NSObject's performSelector) instead of having to be downloaded as text, parsed and interpreted in a interpreter (like Javascript would be).

So yes, in the end, the design is probably quite simple, the database and server side code already exist, if not the JSON portions (though they could have had this already lying around), but basically doing their own rendering was probably the challenge here, both in making it fast, dynamically updated and keep a low memory footprint (not just doing alloc's like there's no tomorrow, but probably actually limiting it to a few controls being presently displayed or close by in the scroll buffer, up and down).