Regardless of the kind of a Web application you intend to build, there are challenges that will always be there. Take a read of what needs to be taken care of first turn to keep your project from going off the rails.
Introduction
Web development is constantly evolving at a staggering rate, creating many new opportunities and making the increasingly diverse related choices all the more difficult.
The fast pace of change continually impacts the existing development approaches and creates new scalability and security requirements and new means to respond to them. The need to opt for the right platforms and technologies and to choose the more suitable architecture design solutions makes it necessary to involve seasoned IT consultants, who can secure your strategic choices and optimally shape your app.
What are the main Web application development challenges you need to effectively deal with when developing something beyond a relatively simple website?
Ensuring Scalability of Web Applications
Nothing can hamper the growth of a Web application and derail the related business plans as a lack of scalability. The inability to add features,a larger number of users, roles, or some other attributes can first become a nuisance and then create a snowball effect.
To prevent a Web application from reaching any of its limits, your Web developers must ensure its horizontal (adding more nodes), diagonal (replicating the current nodes as are), and vertical (increasing the RAM, CPU, or some other capacity of the existing nodes) scalability during the Web development process.
In Web development, scalability can be ensured using several approaches, and it is always best to use a combination thereof.
The choice of software architecture can be fundamentally important here. For greater overall scalability, one should pick a multi-tier software architecture, i.e. one that consists of a Web server tier, an application tier, and a database tier. Having three separate tiers allows replacing any of the software or hardware components for any of these tiers without having to overhaul the entire solution. By the same token, it is much easier to scale some part of a microservices-based architecture than that of a monolithic solution.
When it deals with larger-sized modular applications, it makes sense to take an API-centric approach. When regarded as a fundamental component of your application, APIs can allow you to scale only the required part of the solution. You can also use API gateways to scale separate functions through the corresponding API endpoints.
Database design can play a role in the scalability of Web applications too. NoSQL databases store data in multiple nodes and perform the required computations within the corresponding node. This trait of NoSQL databases helps scale a Web application without extending the response time for user queries.
One of the biggest scalability issues in Web development is the inability of a Web application to support a growing number of users. Basically, there are two options here: use Load Balancing, or opt for Cloud Computing.
Load balancing is a technique that allows one to use multiple backend instances. You can add such instances gradually, one by one, as the number of your users grows.
Cloud Computing allows using the calculation capacity of a Cloud provider and this way provides virtually limitless scalability.
Overall, Cloud Computing is a less cumbersome option, as with Load Balancing you need to buy more hardware and conduct load testing to measure the newly added capacity.
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