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Ataraxis Web Design Company

Greater Toronto Web Design, GTA Development, Managed VPS Hosting Canada

Toronto Web Development Canada

Analysis Of Internet Developer Applications And Technologies

Web Development Defined

Web Development is a process of bringing a web design project into a technical production phase. Someone responsible for this aspect of any project is typically called a web developer but also may be referred to as a coder or programmer. It depends on what technologies are required in any project. Developers should work closely with a designer as well as whoever is going to be in charge of the optimization of a web development project to ensure that a clear understanding of all project objectives has been established.

An important aspect of selecting IT project developers is to determine which stream of Internet applications they have adopted in their work. There are a very wide variety of technologies competing against each other in hopes of becoming the dominant standard. Most importantly, chosen applications have a chance to quickly become obsolete if it is not widely accepted by the international developer industry. If your online business is produced using a less than desirable technology of today, where might that leave it in two or three years? There will be a good probability you may need to then consider a domain redesign.

Web Development Industry Technologies

From my own perspective, my formal education background is as a Programmer Analyst / Internet Solutions Developer. I originally began my Internet technology career in 2001 trained in designing, developing, and programming desktop applications. I worked with a Microsoft stream of technologies built on the Visual Basic programming language as well as programming languages of C, C++ and Java. Along with desktop applications I also immersed myself in web development using Active Server Pages (ASP) server side technology along with MS SQL for server side database development as well as VBScript and JavaScript for client side interaction. Projects developed using this technology are easily recognized by webpage extensions that end with “.asp” or “.aspx”.

These days I prefer to apply a foundation of what is known in the industry as LAMP; Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP. There are far too many reasons to go into detail as to why I prefer these technologies. A strong point is because they are a free open source software stream of technologies that are more widely accepted as well as implemented by our industry. I do believe it will continue to gain momentum due to its free open source structure as well as global web development industry acceptance.

Today, as outlined in preceding paragraphs, Internet technologies are offered up through two primary choices of technology presentation platforms; Linux™ or Windows™. I have experience in both of these main stream development platforms as well as programming technologies required to develop for them. Two choices you will encounter when discussing this aspect of design and development will be Windows™ Versus Linux™ .

Windows™ Versus Linux™

An understandable mistake some people make is thinking that websites developed for Linux™ web hosting can only be viewed by people accessing a domain with Linux™ computers, or websites for Windows Server™ web hosting can only be viewed by people accessing a domain using Windows™ based computers. It doesn't matter which stream of technology is applied server side. All visitors can view a page irrespective of which operating system they have on their computer.

A major deciding factor for choosing Linux™ over Windows™ is post-development hosting expenses. Cost of hosting a domain on a Windows Server™ stream of technology may be as much as 40% more expensive. This additional long term recurring hosting expense can take a serious chunk of change out of your pocket. As by example, this entire domain has been hand coded using a plain text editor and developed for a PHP open source platform. My server is running a Linux based Ubuntu Operating System to serve these pages to you. Chances are you are viewing it from a Windows operating system computer. It is irrelevant which operating system your visitors have. They will still be able to access your site.

XHTML And CSS

There are many reasons why XHTML (eXtensible Hyper Text Markup Language) and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) should be used by an Internet solutions developer. I cannot think of any reason not to use it. Applying valid XHTML and CSS ensures client side cross-browser compatibility and interoperability (try to say that fast 3 times). That ensures accessibility by all technologies so nobody is excluded from being able to access your domain.

Developing projects to be World Wide Web Consortium W3C compliant may be very frustrating for a developer at times. But the long term payoff is invaluable. Web development companies or independent Internet developers should have implemented these technologies into their repertoire by now. It is not a new technology but I am surprised at how much this aspect of design and development continues to be ignored. Strongest arguments for applying XHTML and CSS in any development project is the website optimization benefits that will be derived from it.

W3C Standards

In a nutshell W3C is a non-profit organization that has been in existence since 1998 for the purpose of being a governing body assigned tasks of drafting as well as recommending best practices for developing standards as well as applied technologies.

Standards mentioned above fall within a realm of best practices drafted by W3C. Recommended standards put forward by the W3C are commonly ignored by Internet IT project developers. Ignoring or bypassing standards is one of the quickest ways of saving time if a project is under pressure to be completed quickly because it may not appear obvious to a client. I discuss this in greater detail on another page if you would like to learn more about it please read the Internet IT project management and developer article.

Content Management Systems (CMS)

A term that is in wide circulation these days in the Internet developer industry is content management systems. Enter another acronym, CMS. Some of the most popular CMS applications are Mambo™, Joomla™ or Drupal™. Any conversation with a prospective developer these days will likely turn to this topic. Personally I think it really isn't as easy for non-technical users to learn as some people would lead us to believe. The main reason for implementing CMS into a project is to allow non-technical domain owners to update content on their own. In essence it does help reduce costs associated with updates if a developer isn't willing to enter into a reasonable long term maintenance agreement after a developing process is complete.

My observations concerning these CMS applications is that they produce bloated code that is not search engine friendly. Any online establishment built using a CMS is also typically slow to load because many page requests require constant server side database interaction. Combined with oversold hosting environments it is bound to produce very slow loading pages. Slow loading domains are not good -- down in rank they go. Unless pages are going to receive constant updates, lots of it, I would suggest not using it. A viable alternative solution that I apply is called “server side includes” which is a very practical and extremely simply solution that permits changes across a whole domain in pre-determined elements that are established during the designing and developing stage.

Developing Environment Summary

Ataraxis recommends the LAMP; Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP stream of developer applications. Technologies I apply are PHP programming / scripting for server side processing, MySQL for server side databases, XHTML with CSS for client side markup and presentation, and Linux™ for hosting. You may also be surprised to know that in this day of a wealth of “what you see is what you get” editor applications I still hand code with a plain text editor. I am accustomed to hand coding from my desktop application programming work. I prefer to maintain this practice in my Internet developer work. This ensures very clean source code which produces fast loading pages. If you look at source code of this page (right click; select view source or view page source) you will see it has a very good text to code ratio as well as very good compression while maintaining an easy to follow structure. This is my style for hand coding in a plain text editor equivalent to notepad while ensuring a browser accessing a page doesn't trip over itself trying to render it. As far as graphic designs are concerned, I perform my own custom work using Photoshop™.