Simon Willison’s Weblog

Subscribe

Items tagged webdevelopment in 2011

Filters: Year: 2011 × webdevelopment × Sorted by date


Does one still need to learn C/C++ if one just wants to build web applications?

No—you don’t need any knowledge of C or C++ to get started building web apps—I know plenty of extremely smart and talented web developers who have never written a line of production C in their while careers.

[... 122 words]

How much ram do you need for 100M hits per day?

That entirely depends on what you are running your site on. If it’s static HTML pages, nginx will work fine on hardly any RAM at all (though you would probably be better off serving the entire site out of S3 and not using a VPS at all).

[... 99 words]

Are there any Meta APIs?

Embed.ly is a good example of this kind of API—it gives you one endpoint which wraps oembed APIs on dozens of other services (plus a bunch of custom scraping code). We use it as part of our video/slide embedding feature on http://lanyrd.com/

[... 57 words]

What specific skills are most important in a front-end web developer and in a back-end web developer?

Understanding of web app security. If they don’t know what XSS, CSRF and clickjacking are I’d be worried.

[... 41 words]

What is a single page application and is this the technology I should use for developing  my web application?

Single page applications are applications which are heavily dependent on JavaScript, with just one web page that you visit which then loads all other content using JavaScript. Prominent examples include Gmail and the new twitter.com

[... 360 words]

Can someone improve their knowledge of programming in Ruby or PHP by using a framework like Rails or Zend, or does the framework just do a lot of the work for you without giving you an opportunity to learn from it?

Read the source, luke.

[... 82 words]

What’s the best way to keep a list of online users in a web application?

It depends on your definition of “online”—for this answer, let’s count anyone who has visited a page within the last 5 minutes.

[... 192 words]

What are some other conferences similar to Velocity?

Surge (28-30 Sept 2011 in Brooklyn) has a very good reputation: http://omniti.com/surge/

[... 41 words]

Why does Django still not have support for multiple joins?

I don’t fully understand the question, but if you’re talking about doing a single join across multiple tables the Django ORM handles that just fine. Let’s say you want to get every BlogEntry written by a User who belongs to the Group with the name “admins”:

[... 67 words]

Why do websites contain multiple webpages when they could use AJAX?

Because it shouldn’t require a full-blown JavaScript interpreter just to access content on the Web.

[... 32 words]

How do you stay up to date with Open Source products and technologies?

Lots of blogs and RSS feeds—in particular, I subscribe to the feed of the authors of the software that I’m using, if I can find them.

[... 61 words]

How does FriendFeed work, and what programming languages are used?

It was written in Python, using the Tornado asynchronous web server (which the FriendFeed team developed themselves). They used their own schemaless NoSQL-style store based on keeping serialized objects in MySQL.

[... 51 words]

How are real time web applications achievable with PHP?

You don’t need to build your comet server using the same technology as the rest of your site.

[... 181 words]

What makes mobile application backends different from Webapp backends?

Nothing at all.

[... 18 words]

How can I determine which web server a particular website is using (Apache, IIS, Nginx, etc)?

If you’re on Linux or OS X, use curl with the -I option (to make a HEAD request and see the HTTP headers):

[... 63 words]

Are there any summer conferences in the Bay Area for web development (or any other technology/Internet related topics)?

Have a browse through the list here: http://lanyrd.com/places/califor...—or filter by web development only: http://lanyrd.com/topics/web-dev...

[... 131 words]