Building Scalable Web Sites

Chapter 3. Development Environments

Before you sit down and start writing your world-changing application, there are several things you’re going to need to consider and plan for. Working on a team application with a large code base is a very different challenge to creating small personal web applications. How do you coordinate between multiple developers? How do you work on the same code at the same time? How do you keep track of what you’re doing and what needs to be done? How do you make sure your site doesn’t appear broken to users while you’re working on it?

In this chapter, we’ll look at each of these questions and try to answer them. Our solutions can then be brought together to create a development environment in which you can work with a team and make tangible progress, avoiding some of the common mistakes developers make when moving from small to large projects.

The Three Rules

Everybody has their own favorite rules and guidelines that they absolutely must follow to develop any kind of large-scale application. Depending on the particular brand of development methodology you happen to be following, some of the global set of “rules” may actually apply. But in the field of large-scale web applications, there are three rules that crop up again and again in successful development teams. Perhaps “rule” is too strong a term and “guideline” would be more apt—you can certainly ignore one or all of them and still turn out a working product. These three simple rules are designed to help ...