Rapid web application development techniques

Introduction

Web applications, portals are categorized as application on web that has some functionality. These are different applications than news and other company information web site that has static content.

Development of web application can be implemented based on the desired technology. some of the well known technology is PHP with YII as a framework. The framework provides MVC - Model View Controller. MVC has many benefits some of them being:

• Multiple view support
• Interface component separation for parallel development

ensuring extensibility of the application.

Parallel development process

As shown in the diagram below the web application can be done as swim lane tasks that are assigned to teams. Critical part of the development is validating the design as per customer requirements.

Its observed that requirements keep changing and hence with the above process even though there would be multiple iterations it would affect only the specific type of task - hence process will be less time consuming for overall development.

Rapid web application development

Following techniques can be used for rapidly developing web applications

• Reuse pages with few hidden and changed functionality dynamically
• Define patterns and - reuse similar set of pages
• Design a theme and base all user interface design based on theme and within that scope
• Advanced PHP framework - use all functionality
• Ensure requirements documentation
• Use a defect tracking tool
• Use a QA process to ensure 100% coverage
• Acceptance testing and site deployment is a separate task done by different team
• Find components online that are easily usable and available free to use

Conclusion

A Mobile application is an obvious consequence and benefits from 40% components (functionality service component) that can be re-used. Having said there are deployment issues and acceptance depends on design and clarity of original requirements and initial customer feedback.