So it been awhile since I sort of promised some tips on developing web applications fast. This post contains my five generic tips, which may apply to you (but then again - your mileage may vary). I’ve tried to abstract the advice and not stick to PHP development here, though it’s by far the world I know best.

1. Spend time on the data model

Too often a data model is driven by code, not careful thinking, and this often causes problems has the web application develops and expand over time. When developing a site, which needs data stored in a database (as most web applications tend to do), do try to spend some time on the data model - which tables do you need, what fields should the tables have, are the naming logical and consistent, what constraints and limitations does the data model offer.

It’s always fun to read articles with tips and tricks by other developers and see how they figure “best practices” are handled. Most developers do seem to thing they observations and practices are easily adopted by anyone, and should be accepted without any argumentation or reasoning behind the advice.

One of the nice examples of this, was a story called “5 tips and tools to develop php applications fast”, and while it may apply to the web applications developed by the author, it’s one of those where I question who is supposed to be the audience. All 5 tips are often found in many textbooks and other stories on the net, and in my experience they are all wrong (more or less naturally).

I’ve been spending quite some time the past days digging around in old code (3+ years old with no or very little changes). It’s quite fun noticing what efforts pay off and which doesn’t when you go back to make chance to old stuff. I’m sure my observations aren’t generally applicable. We’re web developers and are keeping web platform (several pretty big websites on a common codebase) alive year after year.

I recently had a little fun playing with the dynamic cache available in the Zend Platform. The Zend Platform is a commercial product, which provides a number of cool professional features to a PHP setup - one of these is the option to do dynamic caching.

With dynamic caching you can cache the output of a function for a determined period and instead of doing database queries or web service calls for a feature, you can cache the results, save resources and get faster pages.

In programming languages common tasks should be easy, and surprisingly often I find my self loading data from some source file into a database. With PHP loading a CSV file into the database - or posting the data to an API - is quite easy.

The only trick is to know the functions file_get_contents, split (and possibly list).

The routine goes something like this:

$fileName = 'rawData.csv';

$content = file_get_contents($fileName);
$rows = split("\n", $content );

foreach ($rows as $row) {
	list($item1, $item2, item3) = split(';', $row);

	// Do something interesting...
}