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Web Architecture 101

engineering.videoblocks.com

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Re: Web Architecture 101

#21

Post by aaavl2821 »

rubber_duck wrote: post #20
aaavl2821 wrote: post #14

I'd love to see more tutorials / examples of implementing some of these concepts. Maybe I'm looking in the wrong place, but most tutorials I see are just super simple apps and don't deal with load balancing, services, data pipelines etc. For people who are working in non-tech jobs but teaching themselves programming so they can build useful tools for themselves, colleagues and customers, I think there's a big gap in…

I'm guessing, but IMO when you're dealing with load balancing, services and data pipelines you're at a scale where you should be able to hire qualified people to do the job so the docs are geared towards that audience.

You're probably right re load balancing, data pipelines and some services, but i think security is important regardless of scale, esp if it's an enterprise app.

Even simpler concepts like structuring and deployment of larger apps, database migration, creating dev, staging and production environments, test development etc would be really useful. These things are important even at low scale, and generally absent from tutorials. Learning this on your own without mentors or CS background creates lots of issues

Re: Web Architecture 101

#22

Post by meowface »

Zaheer wrote: post #2

This is a great overview! It's a shame this sort of thing isn't taught in schools (from my very own anecdotal university experience).

These things were taught at my university (Information Systems major), but the info was pretty out-of-date and not as practical as this article.

Re: Web Architecture 101

#24

Post by mehblahwhatevs »

aaavl2821 wrote: post #14

I'd love to see more tutorials / examples of implementing some of these concepts. Maybe I'm looking in the wrong place, but most tutorials I see are just super simple apps and don't deal with load balancing, services, data pipelines etc. For people who are working in non-tech jobs but teaching themselves programming so they can build useful tools for themselves, colleagues and customers, I think there's a big gap in…

I too am in great need of things like that.

I'm a mobile dev developing an app that I think I'm going to quit my job for to work on full time. I'm 33 and in over a decade of doing mobile (and front-end web) programming I've never worked on a personal project that showed as much promise as this one has for me, both financially and from a fulfillment standpoint.

However the prospect of wrangling the back-end and all the new things I need to do around deploying, scaling, containers, separation of services: cache, API, queue, DB, and making it all secure on top of that is giving me pause and making me less confident the more I read :(

Re: Web Architecture 101

#25

Post by thinkmassive »

thinkmassive wrote: post #15
quickpost wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any other books you'd recommend that come closer to fully covering the topic this post discusses?

Clean Architecture https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18043011-clean-architect... The Art of Scalability (2nd edition) https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25686275-the-art-of-scal...

For anyone interested in building or modifying system architectures I also highly recommend this book, although it isn't web-specific (similar to the DDIA recommendation):

Building Evolutionary Architectures https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36308520-building-evolut...

Re: Web Architecture 101

#27

Post by aportnoy »

Can anyone recommend an introduction to web architecture in the more general and less complex sense? I would like to learn about how the browser interacts with the server (I don't care about load balancing or caching for now), how JS interacts with HTML and CSS, how API's work?

I know a common architecture is JS in the browser making requests to the server and receives JSON and then renders it somehow. Sometime the server renders stuff itself and sends it to the browser, right?

And then there's possibly a database attached to the server.

How does all that work?

Re: Web Architecture 101

#29

Post by mnm1 »

mehblahwhatevs wrote: post #24
aaavl2821 wrote: post #14

I'd love to see more tutorials / examples of implementing some of these concepts. Maybe I'm looking in the wrong place, but most tutorials I see are just super simple apps and don't deal with load balancing, services, data pipelines etc. For people who are working in non-tech jobs but teaching themselves programming so they can build useful tools for themselves, colleagues and customers, I think there's a big gap in…

I too am in great need of things like that. I'm a mobile dev developing an app that I think I'm going to quit my job for to work on full time. I'm 33 and in over a decade of doing mobile (and front-end web) programming I've never worked on a personal project that showed as much promise as this one has for me, both financially and from a fulfillment standpoint. However the prospect of wrangling the back-end and all th…

Nah, don't let that discourage you. You can probably start with a Postgres backend that will serve as your db, full text search, data warehouse, and even job queue. Load balancers in front of your stack are available from aws, etc. and are easy to set up. The rest, like a caching redis server, actual job queue, etc. you can add as you go if it becomes needed. Some language stacks let you run async operations and queues in the server itself which may be enough. There is no need for containers or complicated deployment processes. If you're on the JVM, for example, just create an uberjar and run that. Focus on things that actually bring value to your business and use the simplest, most minimal solution everywhere else. Don't give up on your idea because you feel overwhelmed. Good luck.
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