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If you had to redo a site that has around 150 tables and 250,000+ visitors/day in any web platform, what would your choice be and why?
Some points
The team has experienced developers
The old application is written in unrefactored PHP. It's unusable.
Much of the database is not normalized, and there are columns in the wrong spots. Many new features and the database can't support them now.
Desired goals:
Excellent and fast testing (grails is bad for this)
Good seperation of concerns (domain, controllers, views) with ability to not duplicate anything
Concise code & Elegant design - no code bloat
Flexible - we don't want to run into a leaky abstraction problem
Coding and testing are fast - it shouldn't take 1 hour to write a controller test, or we shouldn't have to spend more than 1 minute or so writing a reusable tag, for example.
Scala is on our minds, but we are having a hard time seeing how that can work as the tooling is not mature yet. We actually don't like Grails. A lot of us are used to Java/Spring/Hibernate, but are sick of the low-level nature of it and want something more expressive.
I would put together a detailed study group to analyze our choices, and see what we can use, and how it scales up to the load and tasks it must stand up to. After that, pick out like the top 5 choices for closer inspection, and see what floats with the team. Personally, I've come to like RoR over PHP.
Depending on the status of the old/current project, make sure everything is backed up and version controlled before it gets touched. Some people leave half their project un-vcs'd, or use none at all!
This is a pretty unanswerable question, because there a large number of factors that need to be taken into consideration which you haven't mentioned. For example, what are the skill sets of the developers who will be rewriting it? How is it currently implemented? Can existing code be reused? What are the performance requirements?
If it was my decision, I would choose Groovy/Grails because:
I like Groovy/Grails and know these technologies well
Offers good performance as it's built mostly on Java and mature Java libraries like Spring and Hibernate
Update
Excellent and fast testing (grails is bad for this)
I am not aware of any web framework that puts more effort into testability into Grails. It makes testing all types of artifacts (controllers, domains, services, tag libraries) very straightforward.
We actually don't like Grails
If you already know Java, Spring, and Hibernate, I find it very hard to understand why you don't like Grails.
good old php / mysql / apache on a linux environment is the most stable I've seen .I'm working since 3 year on a Asp.Net / SQL Server / IIS / Windows and only SQL server is stable, but it's really expensive so if you don't know really where you're going (about money), you better have to take care of this parameter.
And on an open environment you'll find more help, I think.
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I am programming since quite some years now.
Until now I was mainly focused on writing "normal" applications which run inside a console or with a GUI, sometimes also applications which interact with hardware components such as sensors / actors / ...
During this time I got to know a lot of cool programming principles and tools such as object orientation, modularization, unit-testing, test-driven-development, desing-patterns, code-analysis, ..
Also I have some first experience with hosting a wordpress blog, running static web-sites on a nginx webserver, and writing some small php-forms. But I feel like there is still too much magic in all these web-development topics. And I would like to fill this gap and learn a bit more about all these connected scripting / programming languages and technologies. (Because I hate, when I don't understand how things are working :D :D )
I started with some online "Web-development bootcamp" course at udemy to get a rough overview. This took quite some days now and I think HTML, CSS and Javascript for DOM manipulation / animations are clear to me now. Also I heard a lot about NodeJS and all it's derivate languages and databases like Mongo-DB. But still I feel like there is a lot of things unclear to me.
To get to a better understanding I wanted to development some small web-application. Nothing very special, just some website where you have to login to, are able to generate some data and this data is then persisted into a database and once you login again you are able to see the data again.
I first started with developing some classes in Javascript to represent the data in the browser while you are logged in. But I very soon realized that the Javascript which can run inside the browser is very limited and already for unit-testing and modularization into separate files that include each other I actually needed to do some crazy work-arounds or use other server-side languages like nodejs / php / ... .
After some time coding I decided to take one step back, trying to understand the basic design patterns of web-applications and not running for a long time into the wrong direction.
My questions are:
Is there some typical way to go / best practice while developing web-applications?
What are the typical key players? I know there is the difference between front-end, back-end and databases.
But are there some do's and don't's that good WebDev's follow?
For example:
which code is usually written in back-end / server-side languages?
What is usually done in the front-end? (Only desing and animations?)
Do I have to move all business logic into the back-end, also for security reasons or is this maybe also a bad idea because of peformance reasons?
What programming languages are more or less dead and not to be used in the future?
What things are typically reused from frameworks, for example authentication and session handling?
Also I felt like some things I know from other programming languages are not so easy in languages like javascript / nodejs. I am willing to spend time and effort into learning all these things but I would also like to keep the quality standards that I know from C++ /
Python. On the other side I also wondered if these patterns that I have in my head are maybe just boundaries that are completely useless in modern web-development? (e.g. typing, object orientation, modularization / splitting the code to be very reusable )
What do you think am I on the wrong track here, or do I maybe simply use the wrong languages?
I hope the long text is not knocking everyone down / keeping everyone from answering me :o
I would really appreciate your help and guidance to understand everything a bit better and to not repeat the things already a lot of others have done wrong ;)
BR, mezorian
First off, most of the questions are very opionated (at least the answers are) and your question will probably be closed for that reason. So I will post my answer before completing it and expand on it after.
First off a good roadmap to become a web developer. I like it mainly because it shows the crazyness the web development world has come to (don't be shocked!): https://levelup.gitconnected.com/the-2020-web-developer-roadmap-76503ddfb327
Trying to answer some of your question (answers are my opinion):
Is there some typical way to go / best practice while developing web-applications?
I'm tempted to say there are as many ways to do web development as there are web-developers in the world, but that might be a bit exaggerated. If you want some guidelines, I'd pick one of the major web frameworks and learn the way they do web development. With web frameworks I mean all kinds of frameworks starting with JS-frameworks all the way to static site generators, etc. They all have their ecosystem and their own rules.
What are the typical key players? I know there is the difference between front-end, back-end and databases.
(personal opinion) I work with Go in the backend. I love it because it brings back some simplicity in the crazy world of choices being a web developer. Since you know C, Go will probably be easy for you. It has static typing, structs, etc, but no need to manually manage your memory. It is also much faster than most other backend languages used in web development (Python, NodeJS, PHP, Ruby, etc).
In the front-end I have used native JS, jQuery, React, Vue, etc. I'm still waiting for something that makes things easy again. Flutter seems to be something that has a good approach, but is not really a web front framework (yet). (Don't do public websites with Flutter! They are not indexable.) We'll see where it goes.
Databases I will not go into here as that is another huge topic. Let's just say that I'm more a fan of using multiple databases for their specific strengths rather than a big one that is supposed to be good at anything.
which code is usually written in back-end / server-side languages?
Even this depends largely on your choices (framework and preference). One thing for sure has to be in the backend and that is security related stuff. Anything you put in frontend code is visible to an experienced user.
Apart from that there are some ecosystems where you don't write any backend code but talk to a (cloud) service that is basically like a database with a web endpoint on top with secured login. (for example https://firebase.google.com/.) Here the security related stuff is baked into the service.
If you do both, keeping business logic in the backend is probably a good idea. If the frontend calculates something (for quick response), the backend should double check that (e.g. calculating the total in a cart). But this is too general. There can always be use cases where some business logic needs to be implemented in the front-end.
Do I have to move all business logic into the back-end, also for security reasons or is this maybe also a bad idea because of performance reasons?
Performance can be a problem, but mostly because the roundtrip time to the server and back. If you do that for every tiny information, the UI will become sluggish. You might want to think about doing e.g. a calculation client-side.
JS-Frameworks like React, Vue don't request html from the backend, but data and build the html based on that data client-side. I'd use them if I have a very data driven website / webapp, especially if it is user-dependent. Transferring only the data and building the html for every site from it in the browser based on user settings and data, saves a lot of roundtrips.
If you are worried about server performance: For the server to hit its limit, you'd need heavy usage of your website for that to become an issue (at least with Go). If you get there you can still use horizontal scaling (multiple instances of you server) to solve that. Unless you are working for a large company with millions of users daily, I'd not worry about scaling for now.
What programming languages are more or less dead and not to be used in the future?
Warning: Very opionated!
I'd say PHP is dead. Many headhunters I've spoken with agree with me. Companies are desperately looking for PHP developers, because many developers are moving on from PHP to something "cooler". You'll definitely find a job with PHP, but might not be so happy with your job. For me it is also a sign of how modern a company really is (if PHP is not it's main backend language (any more)).
Python currently has a big boom. Mostly because of AI development. I'm not sure if that boom is also in the web development, but I'd say not. I used Python before Go (5+ years ago) and before that PHP (8+ years ago). I rarely get Python web developer job offers (at least compared to PHP and Go).
Go is the language of the cloud. It is perfect for concurrent programming which is an essential part in web development (every http call should be handled concurrently). It is fast and light weight and doesn't need anything installed on the server to run (compiles to a single binary without dependencies).
NodeJS: Haven't used. I'm not a fan of Javascript (but it was (and kind of still is) the only option in the browser), so I never liked the idea of using it also in the backend.
TypeScript: might be an alternative to JavaScript (thinking of frontend here) if you like a more structured language.
It sounded like you want to build a user baser web app with data being managed by each user. This is what I would (probably) do in that case:
Backend in Go
Go serves static files (start html, css, js, images, etc.)
Go server has an api endpoint that serves data (e.g. REST style)
Vue (or React) in the frontend
Vue requests data from the api to build the user-specific content
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I work on studying the development of a medium web application intended for hotlines. So I've real time, concurent access, big datamodel and CTI constraints.
Originaly I'm a php and Java EE developper, but like many of us, I've read a lot of news about node.js and I tested it with small apps. The possibilities of node.js are awesome, but I felt that it's very difficult to only use this technology in a medium/big web app. Indeed frameworks like express are minimalistic compared to productive framework like symfony, play or ROR, etc. Moreover, the node.js ecosystem progresses very fast and might be difficult to maintain.
I'm not experienced enough in nodejs, so I want to know; is choosing only node.js to develop a medium/big business web app with some real time problematics crazy or not? Don't you think that coupling a productive framework with nodejs only for specific features (real time) is a better way ?
Thanks,
Regards
Eric
I'm working on a large real-time business web app that requires some real-time interaction and what we are doing is using django for just about everything, and handling the real-time stuff using the now.js library. Originally we planned on using node.js for everything, but to alleviate some time constraints, we decided it would be quicker to use django.
One thing we have noticed since we've started is that there are a lot of changes, and that some of these changes break what we've done. For the most part, keeping up with the changes hasn't really made it difficult to maintain, however it has made it difficult to follow tutorials and such.
I'm going to answer this quickly, before the question is closed for only being answerable via opinions, not facts.
So, I'm going to answer with my opinion ;)
I think node.js's focus currently is on building small things that respond very quickly. I sense a lot of pushback in the node community against "too complicated abstractions". (It's possible I'm misreading the community, but I don't think so).
To me, building a business app (example: some of my past Rails projects have been 10ish man years) I want an ORM abstraction layer, etc. I think you'd want this building even an app with more than a few man-months of effort in it.
Unless something changes (the node community runs into problems when their code bases grow too large, for example) I suspect the "place" for node.js in medium to big applications is for small hyper responsive things (websockets, retrieving data from external sources and doing small things with it), etc.... not for building an entire big business workflow app.
It's 2016. Recently I decided to go with Sails / Node instead of CakePHP. Today I decided to go back to CakePHP. Lucky enough, I just coded one small module ( kinda of indexing inside a db some filesystem content ). The amount of callbacks and promises It's just annoying to me. The simple task of getting a file's metadata, searching it on Postgres, creating the record only if it doesn't exists, take me more than 20 lines of code and I almost have to drink a bottle of Dramamine lol
This time I am highly determinated to maintain an extreme layer's separation. So my front-end is fully static html/js/css, coded in Angular. Postgres DB also don't require any changes. And CakePHP 3 is almost factory's ready to easily serve json/xml.
Also there's a possibility of me being somehow stupid... lol
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I want to create dynamic sites.. Which language should I use - PHP/Python/Perl/Ruby ??
I wanna make search engines & social networks...
Thanks...
do also refer me tutorials...
If you want to make good, well-performing search engines and social network sites, you have a lot of work ahead of you and the choice of programming language is one of the least of your concerns. Use what you're comfortable with and what has the tooling to allow you to work efficiently. If you don't know any of the languages yet, I'd recommend looking at Python and Ruby first. They have good tools (Django, Rails), and have notable performance attention dedicated to them (and with Ruby, you can run on JRuby, where you can piggyback on all of Java's performance and deployment work).
However, there are a lot bigger problems you will need to solve than your programming language.
Server architecture - web server, database, caching, replication
Code architecture - use a framework, don't repeat yourself
Social design - how does your social network operate? What are the various actions and their meanings? #1 mistake is to just replicate Facebook's decisions without thinking about what the best decision is for your domain. What works for Facebook may well not work for you - you need to think through how the site will operate.1
Search indexing - if you're building a search engine, where does your index come from? Do you use a third-party index, or do you crawl and build your own? Building the crawler will also be a lot of hard work. You may need to drop to C or C++ for parts of the crawling and indexing system if you're working in any of the languages you mentioned.
Short story: there's a lot of things to think about, and in the greater scheme your choice of language among the ones you mentioned is largely immaterial. Pick what you're comfortable with and go with it. Expect to spend a lot of time learning. It sounds like you have limited programming experience - I would recommend picking some much smaller projects and trying to make them work. And follow the advice of smart programmers - teach yourself programming in ten years.
1I'd argue that their decisions don't really work for Facebook either, but that's another story.
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Can anybody guide me to know what is the basics required to learn COGNOS, whether a person who has an MBA or MIS is trainable even without any basic training on reporting tools?
To effectively learn COGNOS' reporting tools, you should know some SQL (at the bare minimum, its syntax) and DBMS basics. You will also use some "programming" logic such as if/else statements and case statements.
More importantly, you need an intimate familiarity with the data you are reporting against, as you will need to verify your reports once you start building them.
I strongly suggest downloading the COGNOS trial with sample data and going through the install guide. Get it running in your local environment and do some testing there. COGNOS is best consumed hands-on.
Your education level has nothing to do with how you are able to comprehend and utilize a web application. I am nowhere near an MBA or MIS, and the majority of issues I have with COGNOS are related to how it aggregates data.
Javascript (jQuery, preferably) is pretty much a necessary to get more usable interfaces, so knowing that helps a lot too.
Knowing Java can be useful if you are required to work with the SDK. As far as SQL make sure your familiar with joins and different functions of the dialect of database you are using. It is also important to have a basic understanding of HTTP because your often configuring the environment.
Cognos is a powerful tool, so once you have all configured the report authoring is fairly simple. However, based on my experience I would recommend to have the following skills:
1. SQL. Although you can develop lot of functionality in the Framework Manager or even in Report Studio, mapping queries from DB is crucial.
2. HTML. Cognos outputs are rendered in HTML so it would help basic skills here. Besides, the layout uses lot of tables so make sure you understand those concepts well.
3. CSS. Behind the scenes, Cognos uses lots of CSS to styles, themes and defaults. You can even create custom themes. If you're going for a big project, make sure to backup the CSS files and modify everything from there. It is a hardache to modify styles within Report Studio as any minor change would be cumbersome.
If you master these skills, learning Cognos is not such a painful process. Check my tutos in youtube if you like: http://youtube.com/maulazyhola, I wish I had time to write more, but they got some cool stuff that would help you.
In case anything comes up you can post it here, I would be glad to help. Cheers.
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I'm going to build a high-performance web service. It should use a database (or any other storage system), some processing language (either scripting or not), and a web-server daemon. The system should be distributed to a large amount of servers so the service runs fast and reliable.
It should replicate data to achieve reliability and at the same time it must provide distributed computing features in order to process large amounts of data (primarily, queries on large databases that won't survive being executed on a single server with a suitable level of responsiveness). Caching techniques are out of the subject.
Which cluster/cloud solutions I should take for the consideration?
There are plenty of Single-System-Image (SSI), clustering file systems (can be a part of the design), projects like Hadoop, BigTable clones, and many others. Each has its pros and cons, and "about" page always says the solution is great :) If you've tried to deploy something that addresses the subject - share your experience!
UPD: It's not a file hosting and not a game, but something rather interactive. You can take StackOverflow as an example of a web-service: small pieces of data, semi-static content, intensive database operations.
Cross-Post on ServerFault
You really need a better definition of "big". Is "Big" an aspiration, or do you have hard numbers which your marketing department* reckon they'll have on board?
If you can do it using simple components, do so. The likes of Cassandra and Hadoop are neither easy to setup (especially the later) or develop for; developers who are going to be able to develop such an application effectively will be very expensive and difficult to hire.
So I'd say, start off using your favourite "Traditional" database, with an appropriate high-availability solution, then wait until you get close to the limit (You can always measure where the limit is on your real application, once it's built and you have a performance test system).
Remember that Stack Overflow uses pretty conventional components, simply well tuned with a small amount of commodity hardware. This is fine for its scale, but would never work for (e.g. Facebook), but the developers knew that the audience of SO was never going to reach Facebook levels.
EDIT:
When "traditional" techniques start failing, e.g. you reach the limit of what can be done on a single database instance, then you can consider sharding or doing functional partitioning into more instances (again with your choice of HA system).
The only time you're going to need one of these (e.g. Cassandra) "nosql" systems is if you have a homogeneous data store with very high write requirement and availability requirement; even then you could probably still solve it by sharding conventional systems - as others (even Facebook) have done at times.
It's hard to make specific recommendations since you've been a bit vague, but I would recommend Google Appengine for basically any web service. It's reliable, easy to use, and is built on the google architecture so is fast and reliable.
i'd like to recommend stratoscal symphony. it's a private cloud service that does it all. everything you just mentiond - this service provides perfectly. their symphony products deliver the public cloud experience in you enterprise data center. if that's what you're looking for, i suggest you give it a shot