The seven ordeals of the web application developer – Part 7

Developers who seek their fortune in the web business applications market must face and survive seven ordeals and success will only favour those who come prepared.

1. The First Ordeal: User experience

2. The Second Ordeal: Compatibility

3. The Third Ordeal: Time to market

4. The Fourth Ordeal: Finding the right tool

5. The Fifth Ordeal: Integration

6. The Sixth Ordeal: JavaScript

7. The Seventh Ordeal: Deployment

After surviving many ordeals and completing the web application, the developer must then face the ordeal of deployment.  If you thought it was as easy as uploading the elements of the application onto a web server and configuring the IP address, think again.

Is your application going to generate large traffic? Will it require load balancing to make it scalable?  Does your database require load balancing and the ensuing replication?  Do you need the users to have any plug-ins installed?  Do you have to install libraries and frameworks on the server and the client?  Does your ISP support the “application stack” you require?  How about version control?  What about the security?  Do you need support 24/7?  What are the back-up requirements of your application?

These represent just a fraction of the questions you need to ask yourself when you decide to deploy your application.  The fact is that many of the tasks involved are repetitive and there is no excuse for not being able to perform them with a single click.

Development tools designed for the web must take a global approach to task automation. Some already do but more is needed in order to shield the developer from the mundane deployment tasks.  Automatic deployment is going to be a compulsory feature of any professional web development IDE in the future.

We will talk about Morfik’s auto-deployment in the future but in the meantime you can find more about deployment issues in these technical blogs.