I've been working on a web app (in beta) for company for the past few months. Now that we're at the point of release, looking back, we should have had a better versioning system in place. We've got a ruleset in place for future releases, so I'm hoping that we can develop some better internal practices going forward.
What are some examples of web application (or desktop) changelogs that stand above the crowd?
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I am creating a roadmap for building a portfolio of systems/tools that will be utilized by financial services clients as their end to end solution. I want to make a decision on whether to write the code in WPF or build a web based application using a framework such as Angular. I have a ton of experience in WPF but have 0 experiences in web based application development. In case I chose the web route, there will be a learning curve for me. Their will be 3 other developers and a UI designer who will work with me. I don't care about the one time development costs for getting the product to the market. I care about using the correct framework for the problem at hand
Following are the criteria for making this decision:
At the height of my business I will have atmost 60 clients and each
client will have atmost 10 users.
The application needs to be highly responsive.
The entire application will consume around 300MB of memory in the worst case.
Clients don’t want a product that increases their hardware/maintenance costs dramatically.
They want to be able to work from home.
The users will not use the application via tablet/smartphone.
My first thought was to build a web platform for this because anything I read/listen tells me that web is where the world is going. However, I have the following concerns
It doesn’t seem like the web frameworks that are out there are at par with WPF. (In case you have not read, Microsoft recently came out with a roadmap for WPF to show that it’s not dead)
None of the competitor’s products are web based. Most of the products in the market are 4-5 years old and back then web frameworks were much worse.
Some of the competitors are distributing their WPF/Java based product via Citrix. This gives clients a choice between downloading the application on the desktop or using it via Citrix in which case the application isn’t installed locally and also gives them an option to work from home.
With my non-existent experience in web development architecture, it seems like the main reason to develop a web product is “because all the cool kids are doing it” and because “that’s where the world is heading”.
I would love to hear your thoughts and guidance on how to make this decision.
I have also struggled with a similar problem. There are two factors I will consider which are taking use of the full computer power and the UX (User Experience). WPF is the best for very complex Financial applications which deals with multiple documents at the same time. In a web application, to make the UX simpler, you deal with one document at a time.
I'm trying to develop a hybrid app which will deliver a range of simple teaching material to the user. I am planning on using Telerik App Builder in conjunction with Cordoba 3 to create the app. What I cannot decide is how best to package the actual content into the application. I'd like to achieve a separation of the content from the code, and just combine the two when building the delivery packages. (The content is being prepared by a subject matter expert.)
Is there a way I can use Cordova or Telerik AppBuilder to pre-populate a SQLite database as part of the app install process? Or am going about this in completely the wrong way? I have been researching this in the Telerik documentation but without success so far. If someone could point me towards a suitable example or even the correct places in the Telerik or Cordova docs I'd be very grateful!
I recently ran a techie webinar on the topic. The main idea is that you need a centralized system to host this content and this system needs to expose some kind of a service layer that will feed content to your app. To me this seems like a very growing market opportunity, but feels kinda the same as the web 1.0 days where all of us were trying to figure out how to feed cotnent to websites and everybody was building their own CMS in a way.
Telerik Backend Services provides an editing interface, so it can fit some requirements, but it's not a publishing system, plus you may not want to pay developer licenses to your back-end users or provide them with access. The premise of the webinar I am talking about was that we discussed how to integrate with another telerik product - Sitefinity to do this job for you instead. The first 20-25 minutes are an overview of the platfrom, so if you have seen it already, you can certainly jump to ~;0:25 to see the rest
http://www.sitefinity.com/campaigns/webinars/build-content-driven-mobile-apps
Now certainly it doesn't have to be Sitefinity or CMS for that matter, Sitefinity provides a bunch of App Builder related features that are handy, but you technically have a few options:
- Build your own applicaiton and back-end.
- Use any type of CMS or platform that will give your SMEs the back-end interface to publish and the service layer to expose to the app. In the webinar I also go through some neat tricks such as using push notifications upon publishing.
This way you get a clear separation of content and code - you can even get a separation of content structure and code, which is an idea i talk about in greater detail.
I hope this helps!
Svetla
I am creating a website with a friend to try and make some money. Basically, we want to let users aggregate data from different social networking site's APIs (FaceBook, Twitter, etc.) and do some cool things with the data.
My non-developer friend is sold on the Google App Engine because it costs nothing at first, and then you pay as your traffic/data increases. I am torn. I like being able to bootstrap the business like that and have no startup costs (other than time) but I am worried about learning a whole new "programming world" as Joel Spolsky would put it.
I am so comfortable with C#, ASP.NET MVC and SQL Server that I think moving to something like Java or Python on top of BigTable would end up taking about 3x longer to develop (if not more).
Can anyone give me some guidance on this? Basically, I am wondering if there is any way I can have the following with the Microsoft stack:
Free hosting up to some limit of traffic
Ability to scale out at a cost similar to what Google offers with GAE (maybe the hosting service would need to have support for a good scalable persistence solution--like Couch DB?)
For #1, I am OK if that means hosting it on my own server for the ALPHA/BETA phases. For #2 I am hoping that there is a good hosting service out there who can put me on shared hosting servers and charge by the traffic. Does that exist? Thanks!
Unfortunately when it comes to a similar platform then you won't find a MS Stack version. Windows Azure comes close but this is more akin to Amazon's EC2.
The python stack in GAE is really easy to use and was able to make the transition quite quickly. Django is a MVC that is really popular and quite simple to use. It also gives you a ORM to write to BigTable which means you don't actually have to care about it.
The Java implementation is very similar and you can use really well know MVC frameworks for creating your app like Spring
I am also a .NET expert, but I have been using Python-AppEngine for hobby/entrepreneurial purposes specifically because it allows me to bootstrap an new web application at no initial cost. That is critical for me, as I have no budget at all for side projects, and so far, with many deployed AppEngine applications, I haven't spent a penny on it.
Learning a new language can seem like a drag at first, but I have come to find my new expertise in Python to be invaluable. Remember that the best and most employable developers are usually generalists with a broad and flexible palette of skills. My resume features C# and .NET as well as Python and Ruby/Ruby on Rails, and I have gotten very positive reaction from potential clients and employers.
Learning Python was dead easy. Getting a handle on WebOb and Django templates took more effort, but nothing extraordinary. Over time, I built up my own framework layer on top of those things that incorporates the best ideas from Rails and ASP.NET MVC that I missed. You can take a look at it on Google Code, and you will see a number of ideas that specifically borrowed from ASP.NET MVC.
I have only very basic experience with HTML/CSS and have quite a bit of experience with testing software and web apps from a consumer perspective. I'd love to launch a web application that plays nicely with Google services, similar to some of the apps you'd find on the Google Apps Marketplace, such as ManyMoon, time to note, Socialwok, etc. I'm a huge Google fan and would like to build something that's well integrated with other Google services.
If you were a total beginner and wanted to build a complex app like one of examples above (project management, CRM, etc), where would you start?
If you worked your ass off 18 hours a day, 24/7, how fast could you do it?
I've dabbled into various languages and development frameworks, and read about which apps are using what languages but it's hard to figure out what would be most beneficial to jump into. Ruby on Rails, PHP, Google Web Toolkit, AppEngine. The list goes on and on. I want to be able to build and launch my own scalable web app.
Thanks.
One bit of advice: There is no shortcut for proper experience. It took me 4 years to come to a point where I can build enterprise level web apps - even though I had the dream of building one immediately, right from the beginning. Start small and build your way up.
Even though I did hate this advice when I was receiving it... Don't try to build the next Facebook platform right now.
Now, to answer your question:
Skills:
You must be absolutely clear about server-client interaction with respect to HTTP. You will never understand AJAX fully without understanding HTTP and behind the scenes of browsers. Note: being clear and knowing everything are two different things. Be clear about HTTP.
Learn about HTML/CSS and JavaScript standards to some extent to know that they bahave differently in different browsers. In the grand scheme of things, they are not that important if you are okay with some framework that handles these for you (I recommend JQuery and JQuery UI).
Learn a little about Linux, Apache, PHP.
How to go about it:
To develop web-apps, you could start with the LAMP stack - Linux + Apache + MySQL + PHP.
First build a small web app that does something trivial - like saving and retrieving user's stuff using AJAX and a nice UI or something. I'd recommend jQuery and jQueryUI for JavaScript and UI frameworks.
Then, build a small web app that just gets data from some Google service, given a user's credentials.. I am not Google expert but I guess Google provides APIs for some services(?).
Then build an app where two people can share their data coming from a Google's service or something to that effect.
Then add your own fancy stuff.
It goes on like that.
If you are a .Net person, you could go with.. Windows + IIS + MS SQL Server + ASP.Net3.5/VB/C#. Guess what? StackOverflow is build on that stack :)
Learning about and using an MVC framework is also a good idea - ASP.Net MVC or something similar for PHP.
Minor clarification - By Google-friendly did you mean SEO-friendly? If so, Google-friendly and web-app don't go well together.
It makes sense to build a Google-friendly website not a web-app.
I would start by
brainstorming a hands-on project
identify the skills you will need to achieve it
learn them as you work through the project
set progress goals and celebrate small victories
For most people 18 hrs/day 24/7 sounds a little overly optimistic. A reasonable goal would be to form an interesting project idea and research the needed skills the first week, work through a few tutorials and maybe apply your own functionality the second week, build something 'complete' the third week, then take a step back and take another look at your original goal.
As far as choosing a project, I find a notepad helps. I'll be somewhere and think, 'wouldn't it be nice if...' and I'll go look for a solution that provides that 'what if' and find it doesn't exist. So there you go.
I would also have a look to one of the top voted questions here on Stack Overflow:
What should a developer know before building a public web site.
After 9 month developing an enterprise application using MVC + JQuery our Management and stockholders interesting to convert and switch to silverlight! they think it's more powerful than Ajax, make development speed faster than our current solution, It's Windows and Web and less headache.
Unfortunately, our stockholders dos not know anything about web and stateless state of web application and they always compare with window applications.
But nobody in our team know anything about silverlight. I am not sure that is a good decision. I think we develop as fast as possible. we develop a great framework and code generator for fast develop.
Thanks and sorry for bad English.
Dumping what you have and going for a rebuild mid development is almost always a bad idea.
For a personal project, I did exactly this. It was originally built during the betas of asp.net MVC. I got the app to a stage where it was usable (actually I still use it daily), but it was nowhere near ready for the outside world. And this was the problem; it was going to take an enormous amount of work so that other people could use it...
When Silverlight 3 was announced, I literally grabbed the backend of the app - stuck RIA services in between and had a few screens up and running that day without any prior SL knowledge. I probably could have kept going down this path but something clicked when I started to realise the power of silverlight. The goal posts for my app moved, and I began a SL specific rewrite.
Since then, I've started re-writing about 5 times over. I guess I'm still just learning how to best build an app in SL, having spent the last 12 years or so of my career working on stateless web apps, there was a big mental shift involved.
I'm a much better web developer then I am a silverlight developer, but if it was for a real project (rather then a pet side project) - it would have been shipped and out the door by now.
I'm convinced that SL is the ideal platform for most web applications (as long as it being a plugin isn't going to be any issue).
With that said, shipping is still the most important thing. SL is great, but the learning curve is steep. If you guys are anywhere near completing the app, I'd insist you forge on with mvc and maybe get someone to build a SL branch.
Re-platform an application is always costly, although if you've got your MVC right it should theoretically be easier to replace the "VIEW" part of the application with something else.
As to whether Silverlight offers you more than HTML / JavaScript is down to what you're using it for. If what you are doing is media-related or highly graphical, Silverlight might be a good choice. If your application is like most business apps (i.e. some input fields backed by some read / write to database) Silverlight doesn't really offer any tangible time saving for this kind of operation.
If the web application is public and you care about search engine indexing, semantic HTML offers the best possible option.