Developing Large Web Applications

Foreword

Nate Koechley

San Francisco, January 2010

As a little kid, I wondered if I would be big and strong when I grew up. There were a lot of aspects to growing well. Would I be healthy? Useful? Productive? Successful?

Websites start out small, too. But these humble sites share my childhood dreams. They want to help more people in more ways; they want to be durable and reliable; they want to be indispensable and to live forever. In short: they want to be large and successful.

But growing up is hard to do. Challenges accumulate and complexity snowballs.

Expansion means complexity and complexity decay.

—C. Northcote Parkinson

I’ve seen it. The inevitable challenges of growth in websites—data management, performance—become crippling if mishandled. Things you thought were straightforward, like HTML, start giving you headaches. From front to back, JavaScript to PHP, harmony is displaced by dissonance.

Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.

—Alan Perlis

I’ve worked hand-in-hand with Kyle on some of the Web’s largest applications. I’ve watched him craft CSS systems to make sprawling sites skinable and design Ajax architectures that adapt to and enhance the sites. He emerges from the trenches on top every time. He’s a perpetual teacher, and, like the best in any discipline, also a perpetual student. We all benefit from his expertise.

Kyle shares his genius and hard-won expertise in this valuable book that will prepare you and your application for scale and success. The book is well structured and readable, with memorable tenets supported by savvy insights, sound philosophy, and fully functioning code examples. Complexity is inevitable, but success rewards the prepared.

The way to build a complex system that works is to build it from very simple systems that work.

—Kevin Kelly

During this book’s deft tour of the complete web application stack, Kyle, the perfect guide, converts lines of explanatory code from one context into insightful tips in another. Build big by thinking small. Build new by thinking old. Manage scope. Boost signal and reduce noise. Resist breakage...these things are easy to rattle off, but it takes an author like Kyle, and a book like this, to make them practical and real.

If you’re ready to build a finely crafted large site, this is the book for you. Learn what it takes, because today’s compromise is tomorrow’s constraint. Start today, because the world is waiting for your application.

Grow large and prosper.