This post is part of a series of mine on building web applications from the ground up. It covers everything you need to know to completely finish a web application. If you haven’t been following the series, please go back and read part 1.
So you want to build a web app. Well, what’s stopping you? If you’re reading this, you’ve probably already been programming for some time, but you’re just missing some of the steps. I’ve been there before. I know how frustrating it can be to know 70% of what you need to do to build a killer web app for an idea you have, but not have enough knowledge to take the idea from beginning to end.
In the modern world of web app architecture, it’s truly too easy to become lost in the variety of options available to us. When it comes to building web applications, a few stand out. But the task of deciding which architecture to use is still daunting. We’re all probably familiar with the classic Model-View-Controller pattern (MVC). But then there’s MVVM, MVP, Flux, and a variety of others. What are the differences? Which is right for me? How do they compare to each other? These are the questions I’ll try to answer. I will make general recommendations regarding the use of certain architectures, but these cannot be applied to all projects, as every project is unique.
Unless your web application is 100% client-side code, you should split it into a backend API and a frontend client. Too often people fall into the trap of believing that because they need a “quick” turnaround they shouldn’t spend the time developing a separate API and client-side app, or they believe that their application is small enough that they can get by without doing this.
I recently went to Austin, Texas to present my research on best practices and common mistakes in game development at the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE ’16). My paper, titled “What Went Right and What Went Wrong”: An Analysis of 155 Postmortems from Game Development, presents an empirical study on postmortem reviews from game development. I coauthored this paper with Pavithra Sathiyanarayanan, Meiyappan Nagappan, Thomas Zimmermann, and Christian Bird.
This tutorial will show you how to serve a Django application by using PostgreSQL, Gunicorn, and NGinx on an Ubuntu server. I created this tutorial because when I started configuring my server, I had a lot of trouble finding anything useful when it came to serving Django apps built in Python 3. I found that virtually all the tutorials I could find still insisted on using Python 2. So, this will show you how to turn your Python 3 Django app into a fully fledged website. This tutorial uses the following software with the corresponding versions:
