I've been tasked to develop a web application to cover one of our business functions. It needs to have external access from outside our network. At the same time, it needs to be done fairly quickly. I don't have any experience in extranet applications so I'm not exactly sure what all is involved. Learning about it is taking time. I'd like to get the app working first.
What kind of things should I be considering if I decide to not incorporate external access from the beginning and tack it on later? Is that just doomed from the get go?
Thanks, Keith
You can take many things for granted when you are developing for local network:
Highspeed network
Trusted user base
Same timezone for all users (this makes maintenance jobs easier to schedule among other things)
Control over which browsers and versions users should use
Authentication against LAN authentication system or no authentication at all due to trusted nature of user base
Custom port number on web-server as there is no firewall between users and web-server (though this more of deployment issue)
You will need to challenge all these assumptions when designing for extra net. For example you should estimate the slowest client connection you need to support. Oddest or most restricted browsers your users might use.
If you decide to use SSL, do check the performance of your website on the slowest connection from the beginning. I have seen many SSL sites perform terribly on slow connections.