Lessons Learned from labelwriter.com Shutdown

Recently the site we use to host most of our SDK samples, documentation, installers, etc was in a coma for almost a day. Fortunately,  it survived. Unfortunately, this caused a lot of trouble for our users, for which we are sorry.

Some lessons learned from this unpleasant expirence:

1. Don’t host a front-end and a back-end on the same site. By front-end I mean a standard web-site, by back-end – a file storage, developer’s documentation, etc. Some day a manager who knows nothing about the back-end will come and decide the web-site should rest in peace. IT will break everything in a flash, but its not that easy to restore.
2. Some developers link directly to js library from labelwriter.com. Though we will try not do make the same mistake again, the site is not really designed to be used in mission critical applications. So, it would be a good idea to host the library on your own sites, where you have more control.
3. Some developers link to the “latest” version of the library from their pages. This latest file is not intended to be used on production servers. The file serves two main purposes. First, at DYMO we link to it from our samples; because we have a lot of them, for us it would be painful to update all of the samples with any new release of the library. Second, it might be linked from a page on a staging server or a test machine; so, a new, latest, version can be easily tested with your application. On production servers, it is better to link to a specific version of the library, that your application was tested with. At the time of writing the latest version is 1.2.