Design and Architecture Overview
Overview of designing the structure of a complex web application
The piece-meal approach we used to design the florist web application helped us learn programming and HTML markup concepts but is not a viable way of building a web application or a web site. The best way to build a web application is to define all the functions it will perform and devise the content of each page well ahead of development. Certain web site design techniques are standard and widely used. Some of these techniques are closely related to software design and development as coding and implementing software programs is a major portion of web application development.
One set of design parameters are derived from the design of the actual domain and its functionality. Selecting an appropriate technology (J2EE or .NET? What version?), selecting software products such as an appropriate database server, application server, operating system, and hardware - the number of servers, memory and so on - result in another set of design parameters. The design, implementation, and testing of the web application takes place on an environment that is identical to or close to the environment on which the finished application will be deployed. Assigning the right permissions, putting the security mechanisms in place, and populating the 'real time' database are some time consuming tasks that should be taken care of before deploying the application in its final environment on the web. Let us address some design related issues in more detail.
