Simon Willison’s Weblog

Subscribe

44 items tagged “webapps”

2012

What are examples of consumer web products which had little or no initial traction, but which persisted in their direction and eventually found success?

AirBnb famously just kept going.

[... 35 words]

Is there a simple way to create a form that asks people to upload a picture and an answer to a question, and then gives me access to that info?

You could build this very easily using http://wufoo.com/—an online form building tool (with a superb interface).

[... 55 words]

What are optimal workflows for deploying one’s web application?

The absolute first step is to automate your deployments. It’s absolutely crucial that deploying the site is a single command. I’ve found Fabric (an automation tool written in Python) works extremely well for this—Capistrano is a popular alternative that uses Ruby instead.

[... 360 words]

Play Framework, Django or Rails? Which one do you recommend for  Social Networking Web applications.

Both Rails and Django have been used for a large number of high profile social networking web applications. Off the top of my head, Django is used by Instagram and Pinterest, Rails is used by Posterous and Ravelry. I don’t know what the largest sites built using Play are at the moment.

[... 149 words]

2011

What are people’s top cloud business apps for 2014?

The combination of GitHub and Campfire has been working extremely well for us.

[... 28 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]

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]

Is a relational database with many-to-many relationships difficult to develop into a web app?

Many to Many tables can be a bit of a pain to deal with using regular SQL, but a good ORM can abstract away any potential complexity almost entirely. I find using the Django ORM means I’m much less likely to shy away from a design that involves a many-to-many relationship because I know it won’t increase the complexity of the application. I imagine the Rails ORM has the same effect.

[... 91 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]

2010

Why are XSS attacks spreading like fire these days?

XSS attacks are common and easy, and crop up all the time. What’s new is that the number of people who are aware of the potential for XSS worms has increased hugely, so when an XSS does crop up in something popular there’s a much higher chance of someone turning it in to a worm (as happened with Twitter the other day).

[... 96 words]

What is the largest production deployment of Server Side JavaScript?

I believe Flickr used to use Rhino for scripting the image processing (resizing, thumbnailing, sharpening) that was applied to every single uploaded photo. No idea if that’s still the case though.

[... 47 words]

Want to know if your ‘HTML application’ is part of the web? Link me into it. Not just link me to it; link me into it. Not just to the black-box frontpage. Link me to a piece of content. Show me that it can be crawled, show me that we can draw strands of silk between the resources presented in your app. That is the web: The beautiful interconnection of navigable content

Ben Ward # 6th May 2010, 8:53 pm

2007

Apple—Web apps. Interesting (and slightly confusing) to see Apple choose “Web apps” as the term for applications targeted at the iPhone and iPod touch. # 11th October 2007, 8:40 pm