City of Kitchener Website

[Acitta]

Kitchener re-imagines online customer service with citizen-centered design

[tomh009]

Looks like they finally punted Laserfiche, at least as the external-facing technology. You can now get proper links to documents. For example:
https://eagenda.ca:5001/IIP/kitchener/me...details/89

[ijmorlan]

Looks like they finally punted Laserfiche, at least as the external-facing technology. You can now get proper links to documents. For example:
https://eagenda.ca:5001/IIP/kitchener/me...details/89

What’s with the “:5001”? It’s not that hard to run a server on the normal port.

http on port 80 just sits there not responding; https on 443 gives a brief message about the domain belonging to some company and then redirects to their homepage.

Lame.

[tomh009]

As long as it works better than the old one, I don't really care what port it's on. I can't think of any downsides besides five extra characters in the URL.

[ijmorlan]

As long as it works better than the old one, I don't really care what port it's on. I can't think of any downsides besides five extra characters in the URL.

Let me put it this way. When I hire an electrician, I expect the boxes for the light switches and outlets to be installed at right angles to the floor; and all the screws holding on the cover plates aligned in the same direction. It’s really just a matter of workmanship. Putting up a production service for the public on a non-default port is sloppy work.

Of course, the old site was nothing but sloppy work, so if this is an actual good system with a few weird deployment issues, it’s still an improvement.

To continue the analogy, the old site could electrocute you. The new one just has outlets installed at weird angles.

[plam]

As long as it works better than the old one, I don't really care what port it's on. I can't think of any downsides besides five extra characters in the URL.

To continue the analogy, the old site could electrocute you. The new one just has outlets installed at weird angles.

Depends on whether one is trying to have human-understandable URLs or not. Also could be trouble with firewalls.

[jamincan]

Port 5001 is a bit odd. A Flask development server defaults to 5000, but if that wasn't available it would make sense to use 5001. Normally, though, when you deploy the app, you would use a WSGI server which would default to HTTP ports. The main reason not to use the HTTP ports is if you are serving several apps from the same domain and then you'd normally route the requests through another server like nginx, which could redirect all requests to a particular subdomain or directory to a particular service on an internal port. I really hope this isn't being served on a development server...

[ijmorlan]

To continue the analogy, the old site could electrocute you. The new one just has outlets installed at weird angles.

Depends on whether one is trying to have human-understandable URLs or not. Also could be trouble with firewalls.

Human-understandable URLs are correct practice, so there is no “if” for professional web developers.

Trouble with firewalls could be a reason for almost anything in development, but definitely not to use a weird port in production.

Seriously, while I’ll admit the site won’t electrocute anybody as it is, you don’t hear these sorts of BS excuses from electricians for why they couldn’t ground that outlet; they just suck it up and do the job properly.