Developing a web application can be a complex maze.

Why is this the case?

As web browsers become more advanced and introduce new technology for developers to harness and leverage, more features open up allowing us to create things that may have been limited in the past. The increased adoption of more forward thinking browsers such as Chrome and Firefox has also helped immensely in this regard. Another major factor contributing to having apps that run within the browser is the fact that your app is instantly available on all devices, whether they are desktops, laptops, mobile phones or tablets. With how much traffic mobile devices account for on the web these days, this is a major selling point.

Technology

Selecting the right technology is an important decision that needs to be made based on experience and research. Some of the important decisions to make will include selecting:

• Language - (PHP, Javascript, Ruby, Java, C, Python)
• Framework - (Laravel, Node, Backbone, Rails, Angular)
• Database - (MySQL, CouchDB, MogoDB, Postgres, Redis)
• Server - (Apache, nginx)

Making these decisions is not always a black or white answer. There are many ways to approach the development of a project. The decision must be made taking into account several factors such as scalability, but should also take into account the available expertise and experience of the team on the platform of choice. People can often get caught up wanting to force the development on the platform that might be the “flavor of the month” and is getting all the press, but that might always be the right platform for the job.

Cross platform

It is vital to know how many different platforms the application must be available on. This can vary from product to product because certain web applications are useless on anything other than a laptop or desktop computer where as other products may need to be accessible on mobile phones on the go to augment the existing web product.

Scalability

One of the most challenging aspects of web applications development is creating applications that scale well. So what determines how well an application scales? For an average user session the following metrics must be determined:

• CPU Usage – Generally can be high if there queries that are not optimized and take up far too much processing in order to fetch the results.
• Bandwidth Usage – This can increase overheads if each user session is taking up more bandwidth than it needs to.
• Database read/writes – The amount of read/writes to the database increase overheads in general, as they are the main culprits of CPU usage.
• Storage -The amount of data an average user stores will increase the overheads and needs to be optimized to manage costs.

Some ways in which optimization can be tackled are:

• Database optimization – Make sure your table structures are normalized appropriately based on the level of complexity of the project at hand.
• Query optimization – database queries must be optimized to ensure that they are efficiently returning the required information. There are several ways to gather information from a database, and the most efficient method is not always the most obvious one.
• Caching – Minimize the amount of reads/writes on the database by using a cache technology such as Memcache. Steps must be taken however to ensure that the user always sees the latest version of the data and not just what the cache has in store.
• Dedicated servers - Assign single tasks to servers such as having a CDN for static files, a database server, a cache server, etc. and create a cluster. Have a way to fire up additional servers as required.