HEJP's Blog

This series is about the process of building a web app: deciding on which tools, building the front and back end, designing the experience, monetisation, every aspect required.

The Web App: ‘Scriblet’

The web app itself is Scriblet which is a simple project notebook application. The app will be that place where you put all of the images, URLs and thoughts you have while working on a project. As such there will be a number of ways of adding items to a notebook from a web and Android (possibly) interface to a Chrome extension, which I think could be very useful.

Considerations

The usual considerations, such as speed and compatibility with as many browsers as possible, are very important. The plan is to have a layered structure to the front end so, for instance, if IndexedDB is available use it to improve the experience otherwise fallback to using purely AJAX requests. Everybody gets an experience but the people using the modern browsers get the best experience.

A large benefit can be gained from minifying code and combining it into one file. This video, JavaScript Programming in the Large with Closure Tools, has convinced me that Closure Tools is the way to go due the powerful Closure Compiler.

Closure Tools

The Closure Tools is a set of tools developed by Google that ease the process of building fast and efficient web applications. Google themselves have used the tools for many of their popular web apps including Gmail and Google Maps. There are three parts to the Closure Tools: Closure Library, Closure Templates and Closure Compiler.

The Closure Library provides functions common tasks such as DOM manipulation and AJAX, similar to jQuery and Prototype, as well as UI elements such as a colour picker and a date picker. Closure Templates are a templating system used to build DOM elements.

The Closure Compiler is probably the most interesting tool in the Closure Tools. It minifies code and can perform complex analysis of the code to remove dead code and rewrite code into a more compact and efficient form. Here is a demonstration of the closure compiler.

Back End

The backend will use PHP and MySQL since they are powerful, popular and familiar to me. The back end will be a RESTful web service. A RESTful service constitutes a number of things but the only aspect of interest is the client-server separation. The client sends requests that act on a resource to the server, e.g. ‘remove project book 14305′, and the server processes. The client isn’t concerned by data storage or the process of retrieving the resource and the server isn’t concerned by how the resource is displayed. This style allows multiple different clients, e.g. web app client or and Android app client, to access the resources through the same service.