Architecting Your Dev Environment

Every web developer has a particular way of working. This can be anything from using particular software applications, to storyboarding with construction paper, to drawing diagrams on paper napkins at their favorite local cafe. Whatever it may be, they learned at some point in their experience as a developer, that their technique works. But if you’re new to the business, you have nothing to draw from. So these next few posts are targeted to the newcomer. However, if you’ve been around for a while, you might learn a trick or two, that you can add to your own tool belt. The following is a list of the upcoming titles in this series

• Application Architecture on Localhost
• Source Code Control Architecture
• Hosting Architecture

Foreach of the items in the list above, I will discuss the technical aspects of setting up your environment. Setting things up the first time will seem like a lot of work. but every additional project will be very easy to set up, once you have the blue print. There are few technical constraints, as most of these concepts apply across environments. I am on a Mac OS X machine, so all command line items will use BSD syntax using the Bash shell. I’m approaching this from the perspective of a LAMP developer. PHP 5 is my language of choice.

Application Architecture on Localhost

This segment will give you a practical, scalable structure that will keep things organized. Also, you’ll be given some very useful bits for configuring your Apache server, as to how it relates to your day-to-day.  I’ll try to ensure that you get all the essential, plus a couple of cool bits.

Source Code Control Architecture

If you’re new to web development, you might need an introduction. However, that’s already been covered by many people smarter than myself. What I’ll give you are suggestions/strategies on how you might make the best of organizing your strategies.

Hosting Architecture

So you’ve got a working a site on your local box. Your next step is to put in on your hosting environment. You’ll need a staging environment, so you can let other people test your code, have clients preview updates that you’ve worked on. the things you learn for the staging environment, can also be applied in your production environment.

Stay tuned, as I plan to write a post every few days.

NOTE: As each post is written, I’ll update this one to link to it.