A really good online book that talks about building internet applications. Philip Greenspun discusses his books and life on a podcast on IT Conversations (transcript available:
Software Engineering for Internet Applications
This book covers all the issues to do with building a web site, topics cover; planning, user registration and management, content management, scaling, search plus some really interesting areas such as XML, SOAP and MSDL and user activity analysis – well worth reading and it’s online free!
There are several data models for each area showing the notional breakdown of structure for the topic. For example under the chapter heading of content management, Philip shows a model for articles and then goes into a great deal of depth on the key elements of the online community specifically discussing the ‘means of collaboration’ and how articles may be posted (as a form of content management).
Part of the collaboration may involve comments from other people, as for example, a blog or similar concept. Again the struture for implementation is shown and discussed looking at the merits and downsides of implementing such a schema.
There’s plenty more besides. Just in the this one article Philip covers; news and discussions, file systems, workflow and related problems, version control, normalisation of tables, plus loads more.
Read it and listen to the podcast on IT Conversations – both are a wonderful insight into the web building community.
Web Notes and Ramblings 