Design your web application

Before you being to write code for you web application, you need to ask you the following questions:

  1. Do you need to connect to cross-platform data source use data service api? If so, do you want to use client-side code (javascript and libraries) or server-side code (php, Node.js, python)? Please note that after you retrieve data from data services, mostly probably you need to clean up and dig out the userful data for your own app to use. Prepare to do some programming.
  2. Do you want to write your own server-side code with database connection, this is necessary when you also wanto to use a database to save your data, e.g. when your app mainly collects and process user-created data (like social media).
  3. No all apps need to use a database, if users just use the app to visualize the data, or create limited amount of custom user configuration data (e.g. a game app), there is HTML5 localstorage and local file system to use and might be eaiser than handing the job to server and database.
  4. The library and web development framework you want to use. There are many choices, for example for my visualization app I use jquery for general DOM manipulation and d3.js for data-driven SVG visualization, and maybe three.js later for 3D webgl visualization. As of framework, I choose ExtJS (version 5 now, started at version 4). Right now I only write client-side javascript code, but when needed I plan to use the Node.js framework for server side integration.
  5. Which browser you majorly use : I use Google Chrome, I like their develop and debug tools
  6. And you are always learning new things, which is good, for a piece of mind looking for nutritions and new excitement. :-) Try to keep your notes open, keep a record of the things you learned, and organize them later as tutorials for ppl who come in later.