Some Companies will Never be able to Cope with Peak Demand.

Posted by Wes Thompson

network-server-overloadIf your application can’t cope with peak traffic, you will lose revenue.

It doesn’t matter how lovely and sophisticated your customer facing apps are, if there’s superficial back-end support, then it’s a serious problem.

Now imagine this:

  • No panicking every time there’s a sales boom or peak traffic.
  • No haemorrhaging of revenue when your site/app inevitably dies under the pressure.
  • No working until you fall asleep trying to fix the problem.
  • Saying “yes” when a partner asks you to be involved in their Black Friday scheme.
  • A peaceful Sunday afternoon before Cyber Monday.
  • Some more time to work on that new project you’ve been talking about.
  • A happy confident CEO instead of a nervous wreck.
  • Developers beaming with delight when they see you’ve got a plan to support their wonderful product.

Just a little investment in back-end support and you’ll have an app/website that can better cope with sudden traffic demands and you’ll be able to rest assured that downtime is not inevitable.

Recently, retailers announced their Christmas sales figures, reporting huge volumes of traffic from online shoppers. It’s a real eye-opener to see that, In the days running up to Christmas, both Sainsbury’s and Waitrose suffered IT glitches, resulting in costly cancellations.

Paul Coby, CIO of John Lewis, speaking at the National Retail Federation, stated that, “having a pretty and award-winning front-end online and mobile is really important to have, but they’re useless unless you’ve sorted the back-end technology, because customers expect fulfilment to be accurate and on time.” In fact, he continued, “you can’t do one without the other.”

One of the best ways to impress your customers is to have a great looking customer-facing apps/sites. There’s no argument with that. However, if you don’t invest in back-end support, you’re gambling all that investment on hoping your backend support and processes hold up. Slow pages and abandoned baskets are orders lost, downtime is customers lost. Extended downtime is a completely trashed online reputation.

Call a Reconnix consultant on 08454210444 or email us: info@reconnix.com to see how we can be all the support you’ll need.

Facebook is going to break it’s API. Are you ready for it?

Posted by Wes Thompson

Facebook recently announced some significant changes to their development platform. The changes introduce a number of new features, including a new version & versioning system of the Graph API, a brand new Facebook login & permission system, a brand new PHP SDK.

Facebook announced the Graph API version 2 change at its F8 developer conference last year (For a full list of the changes refer to Facebook’s change log). Facebook will deprecate the older version of the API on 30th April 2015. So, If you do not update your app, you may experience some significant issues.

What’s going to happen if you don’t upgrade to version 2.0+ on 30th April, 2015? Well, you may experience:
  • Crashes on log in.
  • Errors caused by declined permissions.
  • Empty invite dialogs.
  • Degraded experiences due to dependencies on deprecated permissions.
  • Errors caused by changes in Graph API response format.
  • Palpitations (I made this bit up, but you get my point).
So, by the 30th April, 2015, the following will happen if you’re app is not using version 2.0+ in their API calls:
  • All API requests will behave as v2.0 API requests.
  • Only permissions which have been approved for use by Facebook through Login Review will be shown to people logging into your app.
  • All apps will have to explicitly request access to user_friends in order to call – /me/friends, or call the Invitable and Taggable friends APIs.
  • /me/friends will return only a person’s friends who also use the app.
  • friends_* permissions will be removed for all users of your app.
  • Anyone who logs in for the first time will be identified by an app-scoped ID.(source).

To avoid possible problems with your app, ensure that your API is up to date. For more information look here. Or, alternately, get in touch, we are more than happy to help.

Takeaway points: Facebook will deprecate v1.0 of their Graph API on 30th April, 2015. If you app continues to use v1.0 for API calls after the cut off point, your app may experience significant errors. Update your app API to version 2.0+. More information here.


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A Little Pizza Heaven

Posted by Billy Law-Bregan

pizza

Here at Reconnix, we work hard to provide a fantastic service for our customers.

In June this year, we received a pleasant surprise from a happy customer.

Well, it has happened again!

Reconnix developed an innovative application for one of our clients. The Clients were so happy with the application that they sent in some pizza and, to top it all off, a nice drink to wash it all down.

We would like to say a big thank you for the lovely pizza. And a big thank you to the Reconnix Development Team for providing such a great service.

We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again: We love delighting our customers!

Tell us what you think, leave a comment below :)