There is no secret that today any developer that wish to built the next G+, Path, Instagram etc’ must think on two major aspects:

• Server Side / Cloud Service that she is going to use in order to create the API. Here we must answer some important questions like:
  1. What will I do if I get a huge spike in traffic?
  2. Will I need to manage it? Do I have to do it?
  3. How will I communicate with different clients?
  4. Which technology to use in order to store: data, state etc’
• Client side technology
  • Web technologies: HTML5, CSS3
  • Mobile native app: Android, iOS and Windows.

Modern Web App

It’s not an easy definition since web technology is running very fast. Nevertheless, we can find certain features across successful web apps:

• Self Contained & Functional– They all have one specific goal and they do their best to provide the users the functionality to get to her goal. Few examples:
  • New York Times – Consume news.
  • Hipmunk – Find a flight that is the ‘perfect’ for your needs.
  • Gojee – Find the recipe you would taste and say WOW after it.

• “Offline first” – You will want your web app to work offline. It’s an important feature that will let your users be productive on places like: planes, subways and on spots like: Starbucks when you don’t have (always) good connection. Another very important benefit will be the improve in performance. Since the app will work locally (first) and then sync the state/data the users will get responsiveness that are far better from an app that need to ‘wait’ for network on every action that the user does.

• Client Side Architecture – Since we are moving big parts of our ‘logic’ to the client we need to think about methods that will keep our code readable and maintainable. I guess this is the main reason why we see so many MVC Frameworks. The only advice I can give here is to try few of the popular ones and see how they approach the separation between the data and the UI. If you have some time go over The Top 10 Javascript MVC Frameworks Reviewed. Then, after you try ‘some’ you will be able to pick the one that fit the bill in the best way. For the busy developer (I know… most of us don’t have too much free time 🙂 – Go and play with these three MVC (some will say it should be MV* because it’s not really MVC more MVVM, MVP):

Ember.js – Don’t waste time making trivial choices

Angular.js -Lets you extend HTML vocabulary for your application

Backbone.js – gives structure to web applications by providing models with binding, collections and views

• Device Aware – We all know that mobile is going ‘up and right’. So when you design your web app you should think on progressive enhancement and how it will fit  to different screen sizes. Good examples to look at are: Gmail, Flipboard and Twitter. If you want to go deeper on this interesting subject there is a webcast on ‘mobile web apps’ I did with Oreilly three weeks ago. You can go over the slides as well.

Challenges and Solutions

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