Hey everyone! š Web development is evolving rapidly with exciting trends like Progressive Web Apps (PWAs), Jamstack architecture, and AI integration. What tools and frameworks are you using? How do you tackle challenges like responsive design, performance optimization, and security? Share your experiences and tips!
Cheers,
Haseeb Ahmad:
What is jamstack architecture? I'm not familiar with it.
As far as tools and frameworks, I've pretty much been using the same ones for the past 20 years. PHP + MySQL + Nginx + Redis + Memcached + SphinxSearch on the backend. Cloudflare as a CDN. On the front end, it's Bootstrap and jQuery. Yes, I'm still old school like that. For many years, I used Zend PHP Studio as my IDE. Nowadays I use PHPStorm.
This is a really broad topic. Although PWA doesn't seem to catch up , I write client side web apps more than 14 years now because it doesn't make any sense to me why you should reload the whole page if what you only want to change is the main content. All the other items (menu , UI e.t.c) usually stay the same through pages. Some years back this would be called SPA (single page app) , but the approach that we taken differs in that the main components of the view are generated through the server and not client side. That was against the waves of the times ( "all you need to know is JavaScript" ) and helped a lot with SEO and separations of View logic.
The company that I work is creating manly eShops , the main framework of the company is in PHP (although it is a rip from a Java 2005 attempt) and all the code is in PHP. 6 years now we decided to move all the code back to Java ... but ... this would mean to have a second team to prepare it or to have a pause (more than three months).
Now most of our eShops are in PHP server side and some new ones in Java (that makes things complicated even though we use the same logic in both). We chosen Java because it is an easy mature language without big obstacles for a new member to write (unlike C++) and can 1. really benefits from websockets , 2. eliminate the need to serialize / deserialize for application scope caching and user scope objects 3. benefit for DB pools
No need for other caching mechanism when you have application scope caching , for example you can have all the categories of an eShop in a cached indexed list and traverse an object be its id or by its full URL if you like. Even in PHP you can do it using a ram disk for those files (but still with serialize / deserialize ) , and we experimented a little with a C++ PHP plugin in FPM that would keep those objects alive as long as the app wouldn't need to change them BUT ( a big failure , even though in principle it could work ) ....
Of course we use C++ , (I can't even think how people white crop images in PHP or in Java ... (it is really slow and recourse intensive) ), in PHP we have PHP-CPP that is great and easy , in Java we rarely use JNI for various reasons and prefer to call the executable and get the results.
Notice that some "new" AI or just NPL tools are in C++ like Snowball (to get the stem of word) , but most are in Python (and you can't translate the models in C++ (although in theory you could) ). In this scenarios we use different servers for this work that run a Python "server" script in a port , take the request and respond (only to the allowed IP's of course).
In this work , I have seen many hypes over the years , if you can't really explain why something is better then don't do it. SASS / TypeScript / Node.js like tools , all could have their use in the broader ecosystem , and are great attempts , but are just that "attempts"
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