Steps for developing a Web application

Today has entered the web2.0 high-speed development of the internet era, a variety of Internet Web applications have sprung up. So how do you develop a good Web application as a Web developer? There is no simple answer to this question, even the educational institutions may not be able to know clearly. So, like most web developers in this field, we only learned this by doing experiments. No one tells us how to do it, we start by doing something for ourselves and learning how to develop Web applications is a by-product of the process. This is a very effective way to learn any language.

Differences between Web applications and Web sites

First, I want to say that developing a Web application is not the same as developing a Web site. Although there are significant similarities in general, there are significant differences in the time required to develop them. So what's the difference between Web apps and Web sites? Often, Wikipedia can help us explain the problem, and let's look at how Wikipedia defines applications:

Applications, often referred to as applications, refer to computer software designed specifically to help a user perform one or more related specific tasks. Enterprise software, accounting software, office kits, drawing software, media players, etc. belong to this software.

Relative to the application software is the system software and middleware, they manage the computer performance, management and computer integration, but usually these work does not directly reflect the user benefits of the task execution. For instance, a not-so-good entity analogy, the relationship between application software and system software is like the relationship between a light bulb and a power plant, and the power plant (System software) simply generates electricity and does not have any real use for it, unless an application tool such as a light bulb is used to provide service to users.

Web application development process

Now that the features are clear, we can begin to define the entire process of developing a Web application. Of course, this depends on the size of the project, some steps in the process may be very small, in your mind can do this work, but it is always good to understand the whole thing. It is also important to understand that this article does not describe each step in depth.

Step One: Analyze

The first step in developing a Web application is to analyze your needs. You should now define a list of functions that you should provide as comprehensive as possible. If you're doing this for a client, you need to know what they want (make sure you know what the other person is saying). From your discussion, you can summarize requirements and software specifications. Even if you are developing for yourself, I suggest you write down the features you want the Web application to do.

Step Two: Design

Once you figure out what the Web application needs to do, you can start designing it. This step is often repeated over and over again, and each time the design is refined. The first thing you need to do is to draw a page flowchart (draw on paper, or use a software tool, depending on your own good.) I like to use paper so that I can make more rapid changes. The page flowchart is usually a very abstract black-and-white painting that shows you the Web application you're going to implement (you can add some color, but try to keep it simple).

This step allows you to know what your application will look like in the end. Contrary to what 37signals advocates, I suggest using some words to describe and refine them appropriately. When I think of a good idea, or think about what to do, I label it on paper (for example, when you click this button you should change or hide another element, which I'll write on the flowchart).

When you're satisfied with the sketches you've made, you can start making solid models.
The entity model is still patterned, but with color and detail. The final entity model should look like a screenshot of the Web application you're about to implement. If you develop for a client, he will look at these things and give you his approval. However, many people like to skip this step (most are not designers), they like to go straight to the Web prototype.

The prototype is developed in HTML and is rendered using CSS (and sometimes JavaScript). Page layout to do, links can point, color, font, font size to set up (if you do the entity model, this will be easy). This step is very important because everything here can be used in your final application. If allowed, do some usability testing on your prototype, which in the long run can help you avoid a lot of mistakes.

At the end of this step, you'll basically know how your Web apps are organized together. What the login page is, how the user moves from the homepage to the individual pages.

Step three: Implement Select a Frame

Now that we know what to develop, we need to make it. This part of the work is a lot, you spend most of your time on this. The first decision you have to make is how to proceed, what kind of technology to use, and what framework. You have a lot of options and you need to pick one that suits you. The following is a list of the most commonly used frameworks:

There is no clear criterion for which frame is best. They are all different and each has its own strengths. The most important thing is to know that any one of them will allow you to develop useful Web applications.

Development

Once you know how to develop it, you'll have to open your arms. This development work can be seen as a lot of blocks, but in the final analysis, it is standard programming activity. In the background, you create classes, objects, services, processes, and persistence layers to save these objects to the database. The background is the core of the entire application, and for any application it is no different from normal programming. Next is the development of the foreground, the code you are writing now is the actual user interface. You integrate the backend programs with the prototype interface, integrating the parts of the system together. You can also use JavaScript to implement some of the cool little features you think of during the development process.

Again, there are many ways to implement a background program. It is recommended that you read the information that is relevant to the framework you have chosen and figure out how to achieve this part of the work. Typically, this knowledge is related to object-oriented programming, but some frameworks are slowly driving design development to the domain.

Step four: Polished and polished

Now that the application has been developed, individual modules are also integrated. You need to pass the test to make sure that the requirements and software specifications that you defined in step one are implemented (the problem is in your mind as you develop the whole process). Make sure that those stupid users don't break your application by trying to do something you haven't done yet (refer to White box and black box test). You also need to make sure that your program works correctly in a variety of browsers (hopefully not IE6).

It is also time for you to make small adjustments to improve the way your application feels to people and make it perfect.

Step five: Publish and follow up

This last step (but not the end) is to publish your application so that users can really use it (if the application is a public development application, don't forget to do the news). If you want, release a beta release so that only a small number of users will be able to discover the big problems in your application (because there will be bugs in your app) and they'll help you improve the quality of your programs. Don't be too busy adding features to focus on stabilizing your current program.

After the beta phase, your program has become very solid, listen to the feedback of users, try their own application, you can start to think about how to make the application better. Find out where the discord is and eliminate it. Each subsequent iteration will go through the five steps mentioned above, but as I said at the outset, you now have a running application that you can easily do directly in your mind and run directly into the code to test your functionality.

Congratulations, you are proud to be the author of a Web application.

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