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.
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.
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.
It seems many developers get stuck in the same systems maintaining the same code for years and years. While it may be a common phenomenon there are a few things you can do as a developer to avoid being trapped in your own code forever.
First make things readable. While your brain may be wired to a system of only using single character variable and function names or naming global variables after your cats, no one else will get the system.
At work we produce a few websites and have a few “web dashboards”. Wouldn’t it be nice, if public screens around the office could play a little loop mixing the websites and the dashboards together in a slideshow loop?
After an hour of javascript debugging, a nice little generic webpage slideshow was put together, and if you have a similar need a copy is now available in the lab. It’s simple, it should work in most browsers, and it probably has the least features of any slideshow out there.