Web Development

Integrating Web Applications with Apache

When you deploy a web application, how do end users access it? Often web applications are set behind a gateway device through which end users can access it. One of the popular products to act as an application gateway on Linux is the Apache Web Server. Although it can function as a normal web server, it also has the ability to connect through it to other web servers.

Celtra's AdCreator Platform

Mobile advertising campaigns today are often hampered by broken, non-viewable ads with a poor UX experience. An important open-source initiative aimed at solving this problem and making the web better for all is the AMP Project, which enables the creation of websites and ads that are consistently fast, beautiful and high-performing across devices and distribution platforms.

nginx and WordPress

In my last article, I took an initial look at nginx, the high-performance open-source HTTP that uses a single process and a single thread to service a large number of requests. nginx was designed for speed and scalability, as opposed to Apache, which was designed to maximize flexibility and configuration.

Let's Automate Let's Encrypt

HTTPS is a small island of security in this insecure world, and in this day and age, there is absolutely no reason not to have it on every Web site you host. Up until last year, there was just a single last excuse: purchasing certificates was kind of pricey.

nginx

Engineers love to think that they make decisions based on pure logic and merit. But of course, everyone has biases in terms of programming languages, editors and other technologies—biases that probably can be defended in technical terms, but that often come down to an emotional argument as much as a technical one.

Analyzing Data

My first Web-related job was in 1995, developing Web applications for a number of properties at Time Warner. When I first started there, we had a handful of programmers and managers handling all of the tasks. But over time, as happens in all growing companies and organizations, we started to specialize.

Client-Side Performance

In past articles, I've covered different ways to understand, analyze and improve the performance of your web applications. I've shown that between your network connections, server hardware, database design and HTTP server configuration, you can change and improve the performance of your web application—well, sort of.

Varnish Software's Hitch

Making life easier for the 2.2 million Web sites that deploy the Varnish Cache HTTP engine is the point of Hitch from Varnish Software.

What Does "Fast" Mean?

Good news! One of my clients is launching a new marketing campaign, which we expect will make the business even more successful than before. Bad news! This means our Web application, which has existed for some time on a fairly simple infrastructure, and which has handled a steadily growing number of users, now (we hope) will need to deal with a massive spike in users.

Use Your Database!

I love high-level, dynamically typed languages, such as Python, Ruby and JavaScript. They're easy—and even fun—to use. They let me express myself richly, and they lend themselves to code that easily can be reused and maintained. It's no surprise that interest in such languages is on the rise, especially when creating Web applications.

Django Models

In my last article, I continued looking at the Django Web framework, showing how you can create and modify models. As you saw, Django expects you to describe your models using Python code. The model description is then transformed into SQL and compared with any previous version of the model that might have existed.

Django Models and Migrations

In my last two articles, I looked at the Django Web application framework, written in Python. Django's documentation describes it as an MTV framework, in which the acronym stands for model, template and views.

Django Templates

In my last article (February 2015), I explained how to create a simple Django project ("atfproject") and inside that, create a simple application (atfapp). The application worked in that if you went to the URL http://localhost:8000/hello/Reuven, you got the text "hello, Reuven".
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