Caching is a powerful technique for increasing performance through a simple trick: Instead of doing expensive work (like a complicated calculation or complex database query) every time we need a result, the system can store – or cache – the result of that work and simply supply it the next time it is requested without needing to reperform that work (and can, therefore, respond tremendously faster).
As web applications grow increasingly complex, making your web app scalable becomes of the utmost importance. Whereas in the past writing ad-hoc JavaScript and jQuery would suffice, nowadays building a web app requires a much greater degree of discipline and formal software development practices, such as:
The web also provides some of its own unique development challenges. For example, since webpages make a lot of asynchronous requests, your web app’s performance can be significantly degraded from having to request hundreds of JS and CSS files, each with their own tiny overhead (headers, handshakes, and so on). This particular issue can often be addressed by bundling the files together, so you’re only requesting a single bundled JS and CSS file rather than hundreds of individual ones.
At the Google I/O Conference back in 2014, Google announced Material Design, their new design language. They have since converted much of their popular applications to adhere to this new spec in an effort to provide a consistent experience. Now they are trying to convince you to follow along as well.
After a visit to the official Material Design spec, you will immediately get a feeling of ultra-modern minimalism. Basic shapes and flat colors are the theme here. Going through the documentation is quite an experience. I recommend taking a look for yourself, but I will summarize it here.
Without much fanfare, Google introduced a new version control platform, hosted on its vast cloud. If this sounds somewhat familiar, you may be thinking of Google Code, which is now defunct. The big difference is that Google’s new Cloud Source Repositories is a git platform, which means it is a lot more flexible (and useful) than Google Code.
Google Code was launched back in 2006, a couple of years before GitHub and Bitbucket appeared on the scene, quickly overtaking Google Code in popularity. Google finally pulled the plug on Google Code in March 2015, citing lack of interest.
Anyone who develops web applications and attempts to run them on their own unmanaged servers is aware of the tedious process involved with deploying their application and pushing future updates. Platform as a service (PaaS) providers have made it easy to deploy web applications without having to go through the process of provisioning and configuring individual servers, in exchange for a slight increase in costs and decrease in flexibility. PaaS may have made things easier, but sometimes we still need to or want to deploy applications on our own unmanaged servers. Automating this process of deploying web applications to your server may sound overwhelming at first, but in reality coming up with a simple tool to automate this may be easier than you think. How easy it is going to be to implement this tool depends a lot on how simple your needs are, but it certainly is not difficult to achieve, and can probably help save a lot of time and effort by doing the tedious repetitive bits of web application deployments.