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Related question: Questions regarding software engineering

Here's an example question I was about to post:

I develop a webapp that uses polls a few servers (1-5) for data. The data is then processed and rendered to the screen. The processing can all be done without access to the DOM, and the requests are made about once a second (data size is 5-20kb).

I am considering moving this part of the logic to WebWorkers to isolate the code, not for performance (the processing isn't very CPU intensive). Once the data is processed, the results will be fed back into the webapp. I need to support the default Android browser, which does not support WebSockets, so I'll need to write a shim to simulate Websockets.

My question is, is this an improvement (to make it more modular) or an unnecessary complication in terms of good software engineering?

I don't think this type of question is strictly consistent with the faq guidelines, but I couldn't think of a better site for this question. I considered http://codereview.stackexchange.com, but I am not able to provide the code in question, and the faq there specifically says to include real code, not example code. Also, this area51 proposal doesn't seem to be quite what I'm looking for.

Since this question is pretty specific to software engineering/design, I guess my question generalizes to this:

Are questions about software engineering/design on-topic at Stack Overflow?

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  • Ah, that looks great! This seems like a good answer to my question. – beatgammit Nov 27 '12 at 20:55
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Take a look at Programmers.SE (and especially it's FAQ).

The rule of thumb for choosing between Programmers and SO is: Are you at the whiteboard? Use Programmers. Design done but stuck coding? Go to Stack Overflow.

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  • What!? You understand the difference between SO and ProgSE? What heresy is this? – yannis Nov 27 '12 at 21:52
  • @Yannis Fear not, some remember the old rule of "If it's crap, ..." (actually, I still see a lot of comments to that effect on bad questions on SO). – Daniel Fischer Nov 27 '12 at 22:07

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