Archive for the 'Web App Development' Category

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Craft and optimize your friendly-URLs

Using friendly-URLs in your web application is essential when it comes to SEO (Search engine optimization). Friendly URLs (or some might refer to it as “Clean URLs” or “Pretty URLs”) help search engines’ crawlers to read your URLs and understand better what the page is mainly about. It acts as an additional option to look for keywords apart from looking in the page’s content itself.

There are a few strategies of how people make their friendly URLs to look like. Consider the three examples below:

1. Using IDs without descriptive keywords
http://www.domain.com/items/23 <– that’s the ID of the item in the database

2. Using descriptive keywords without IDs
http://www.domain.com/items/the-name-of-the-item <– (eg: a blog post’s title)

3. Using both IDs and descriptive keywords
http://www.domain.com/items/23/this-is-the-name-of-the-item.html

Explanation

#1 doesn’t explain much…. so while it is cleaner to the eyes, it’s not really friendly to the search engines’ crawlers. You lose a lot of points by not utilizing keywords in your URL to describe your page item. However, this technique is not all useless because for links that doesn’t need descriptive URLs (eg: when doing paginations), this technique can be pretty handy.

#2 is what most people like to use for linking items. The idea is to make the URL “very friendly” so that every part of the URL is descriptive and contains only keywords. No numbers. No IDs. However, this is gonna bring some problem because by using this technique, the application will search for the item in the database based on its name, not the ID. It takes out the slug “the-name-of-the-item” from the URL, chop it, slice it, and then use the string to search for the exact name of the item in the database. What if in the future you decided to change the item’s name? At that point of time, the application won’t be able to look for the item anymore using the old URL. And this is not good. Because if your URL has already been indexed by a search engine, or if someone has linked to that item from his website, users who click on the link will reach an “Object not found”, unless they use the new URL.

#3 is my favorite technique when creating friendly URLs and one that I recommend the most. Always include the ID. And always use the ID to look for the item in the database. The keywords at the end just describes the link. It doesn’t need to do anything else. This way, not only you save time (because you don’t have to write codes to slice the URL and look for the item based on the name), you also ensure that the item will be reachable no matter how many times you change its name. Afterall, that’s the main reason why people create IDs in the first place. Innocent

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Focus on simplicity for your Web2.0 ideas

great ideaForget about creating another Netvibes or Meebo. Leave the complexity of such development to the bigger players unless you also have some very very experienced developers to back you up. For a start, focus on simple ideas. Ideas that a normal person like you and me are able to think inside out. Ideas that the end-users can easily “get it”. Ideas that can even make your mom nod when you try to explain to her about your project. Afterall, it has been proven many times that simple web applications can really make it big in the Web2.0 arena - and complex Web2.0 applications does not necessarily mean they’ll be a success. Think about Twitter. It started off with a very simple idea which stemmed up from one of the very basic questions in life: “What are you doing?” From that idea, they created a community around it. They created widgets out of it. And all of a sudden Twitter becomes a trend.

Or perhaps look at how just a simple online to-do list can have so many users praising it. Or an online project management app that is used by many big time project managers. How about Technorati (blog search engine)? Feedburner (feed manager)? MyBlogLog (visitor tracking)? All these applications proved that we don’t need to think too much about creating an application that does so many different things. A good application should focus on doing only one specific thing, and being especially good doing it. Most users love simplistic, focused applications. And that is what we should craft our ideas upon. There is a saying that goes: “Great things often start with a simple idea”. I believe in it.. Laughing

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Why you should use a Web Application framework

web developmentEven though I have been programming for years, I have never actually fully utilized a web application framework when developing web applications. Part of the reason being that I may be a bit too proud to adopt someone else’s programming structure. I used to believe in my own codes so I always write applications from scratch. That was a big mistake. After I found and studied a great web application framework for PHP since just a few weeks ago, I realized how much time I have wasted all these while and how many headaches I had to go through just to rewrite the same codes and reinvent the wheel all over again.

For those who are new to web application framework, I’ll try to explain it briefly here. Everytime we start writing a web application, there are some basic codes that we need to repetitively write again and again. We had to write the database connection classes for the database access layer, we had to write every objects classes with their basic CRUD methods. Then we had to deal with so many annoying basic issues like Access Control Lists (ACL), data sanitizations, authentications and authorizations, session handlings, and you know… the rest of those stuffs. This same repetitive coding is a waste of time if you keep writing them from scratch. Plus, you can’t be really sure that the structure of your code is secure and lightweight enough to run. Then you started to wonder, “Am I doing this correctly? Is this exactly how everybody does it?” Here’s where an application framework comes in. An application framework is basically a standard programming structure that already pre-defines those repetitive stuffs as well as any other necessary functions so that you can easily and effectively write your web applications in no time.

Let’s see some of the few benefits that I find when using a Web Development Framework:

1. It saves a hell lot of time

Because you don’t need to worry about data sanitizaion, session handling, error handling, and authentication logics anymore (ok maybe just a little bit). Most of these are well taken care of by the framework. No more head scratching. You can start writing functions for your apps straight away without wasting anymore time with those repetitive codings. Double up development process!

2. Organized application structure

Another thing to not worry is about managing your web files and directories. The framework will already have a good skeleton structure to use. No more stuffing PHP files here and there and then realizing at one point that you have messed up with your files’ placings. Business logics can be separated from the interface files. Things get more organized.

3. Flexibility over different platforms

I’m a MYSQL user. If you give me a Postgresql database to use, I’d be scratching my head again if I am to write the application from scratch. Luckily a framework can help me not to waste time studying things that don’t really matter. A few tweaks can ship my application from one platform to another.

4. Secure codes

This is another huge advantage of using a development framework. You can be sure that your application is using good security measurements because the framework takes care of it. No need to worry over those nerd hackers trying to break your application anymore. In fact, I’ve never been truly confident that my application is secure if I write them from scratch. Now that I’m starting to use a framework, I feel much… much better :D

There are endless other benefits of using a web application framework but to list them all here is crazy. So I’ll let you decide the rest of them. I mainly develop web apps in PHP, so the framework that I’m currently exploring is CakePHP. I’ve looked into other PHP frameworks but so far I guess CakePHP got my attention the most.

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