Connecting services

These days most highly active websites will actively involve a number of services from other websites (javascript libraries from Amazon, tweet code from twitter, Google maps from Google, the list goes on).

It's important when developing these services to do so with the future in mind, i.e. to test how the web site behaves when these services are not working or have been withdrawn. 

If the user of your website can't get it to work without these plugins, that's a huge risk to your website and of course your business.

As long as the javascript or the server-side code can detect problems and deliver something that works when the bells and whistles are gone, you're safe.

Making Websites Work, 24th Jul 2010