I’m currently working with a team of developers on a company project to create a centralized repository of product and pricing information. This will be built for both internal company use and external client use. On top of the basic features of storing product and pricing information we also need to build up an infrastructure to accommodate:
- REST API endpoints
- Dev/Staging/Deployment workflows (particularly for performing updates on records in a live environment)
- Logging
- Analytics
- Reporting
- Security (authentication and authorization).
Going over the list, it reads like a very common set of requirements for a web application and I doubt my company is breaking any sort of new ground. SO, is there any particular resources (frameworks, technology stacks, articles, books) that can help me understand how other web applications are tackling these problems?
A bit of background on the team. The team has worked on a handful of small-to-medium sized web applications using PHP, Mongo and MySQL for the backend, and basic HTML, CSS, JQuery on the frontend. The team is familiar with design patterns (i.e.Gang of Four) but to date have not worked on anything requiring all of the elements listed above
It’s probably worth playing around with a solid Web development framework like Zend, Yii or even Ruby on Rails or Django, which are not PHP frameworks, but are fairly mature and well structured. Even if you do not plan to use that framework for development you’ll get some great ideas for how to structure your web applications, how to implement logging and common web security features.
As far as deployment and workflows go, you may want to give Extreme Programming a read if you haven’t already. It describes what many developers today considered to be a fairly classic agile project management methodology, but it also gets into important practices such as testing and continuous integration, which in my opinion are incredibly important components of the development workflow. If you’re starting from scratch as a team you’ll benefit enormously from implementing a solid agile methodology — or at the very least from a solid foundation in testing and continuous integration.
For examples of REST style applications you may want to see how popular open source implementations work. Some of these frameworks will have a REST structure built in, but there are many open source options, some of which are discussed here.
For analytics, Google has quite a bit of documentation here.
As far as reporting goes, I’m not clear on what you need, but if you’re talking about log parsers and bug or downtime reporters there are some excellent tools out there, including continuous integration automation tools such as Atlassian’s Bamboo that will provide some reporting assistance. These can help you with part of the reporting process, but from my experience a large, complex web application can benefit from custom reporting elements, considered as part of the development process from the beginning. It’s not that difficult to parse logs programmatically, I don’t think there’s a one size fits all implementation.
As a side note, Atlassian has some excellent development tools if you’re willing to pay for them, but open source alternatives shouldn’t be difficult to find, such as the ubiquitous Trac for ticket tracking, and basic project management with an integrated wiki.
I can’t say I know of a single, comprehensive location that provides you all the information you need (at least not yet!), but hopefully you’ll glean something interesting from this answer. Starting on some serious web development projects with a fresh team (if I interpreted your situation correctly) can be a really enjoyable challenge. Good luck!