We decided that we are going to utilise Javascript technology to build our front-end application. JavaScript is a computer programming language for scripting interactive effects inside web browsers. According to a survey that we found, JavaScript has been used by over 90% of all websites. JavaScript can be used not only on every website but also on web applications and games. Despite its popularity, several other considerations to use this technology are as follows:
- Javascript enables us to make use of Object Oriented Patterns and principles.
- Javascript is easily extensible; It can do extremely complex things behind the scenes or manipulate aesthetics on web pages in ways users wouldn’t believe. However, some of these manipulations are difficult to design and construct. It requires lots of code and time to develop. Nonetheless, other developers have written several very good libraries to support the language and allow it to easily manipulate web pages with just a few lines of code.
- Client-side processing; it means the code is executed on the user’s processor instead of the web server, thus saving bandwidth and reducing an extra load of the server as well as providing a fast connection which will be essential for streaming video/audio based application such as JAMZ.
- AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript and XML); It is a set of interrelated web development technologies which enable web browsers to interact asynchronously with a web server. Using AJAX, our web pages will be updated in the background without reloading or refreshing the web page. This means our user’s experience while surfing our web will not be interrupted but also dynamic because the content of the web page is continuously updating to the newest version. Whereas initially the web was a place for viewing static web pages, AJAX has now transformed the web into a place where users can interact with websites and other users as well.
On the other hand, Python will be our first choice of our programming language for server side. Python is being widely used for its high-level, general-purpose, interpreted and dynamic programming language [1]. One of the main reason we use Python over the other programming language is the fact that its design philosophy emphasizes code readability and its syntax allows our developers to express our concept in fewer lines of code. Resulting in fewer effort and resources needed by us as well as quicker for our go to market date. On the fundamental level, Python supports multiple programming paradigms such as object-oriented, imperative and functional programming or procedural styles. This fact is working in conjunction with the Javascript as our front-end technology because the fact that Python’s object-based subset is roughly equivalent to Javascript.
Furthermore, We will use MySQL server and services like Heroku to host our application. Heroku is a cloud Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) provider. One of the main reason for using Heroku is because we would like to avoid the risk and complexity to building our own infrastructure. Heroku platform also works with the programming language that we have already chosen, which is Python. In addition to that, Heroku platform makes it easy for our application to scale.With that said, we hope that Heroku will reduce our development time by eliminating the need to consider about the platform architecture.
[1] “Welcome To Python.Org”. Python.org. N.p., 2015. Web. 26 Apr. 2016.
