Blog Posts

"I found out that you guys just build an amazing mobile app for your e-commerce venture, I heard you are using Symfony 2 for your back-end APIs. How did you make it that fast?" This is not very different that what I was asked some months back. The answer is we use a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) where all back-end service follow the REST architecture to communicate with all the clients. The client can be built in any language as longs a they can do HTTP calls. Lets look at what Symfony 2 bundles you can use to build a similar scalable, fast and cacheable REST APIs.

I assume that you have some experience with Symfony 2 including how to use composer to download dependent libraries/bundles.

What is REST

REST, short form for Representational state transfer is a resource based client and server communication protocol which is stateless and cacheable. It is an abstraction over HTTP communication where emphasis is given on uniform interface to make the communication structured and consistent. This video describes the constraints of REST and explains what it is or read a simpler one.

A software engineer tells to a colleague in his team "Man, it is working on your machine, but why is it not working on mine?", then they both find out that one has Ubuntu 12.04 LTS with PHP 5.3 and the other software engineer on which the code is working is Ubuntu 14.04 with PHP 5.5 after some investigation. If you have ever faced this or similar problem its high time to switch to a portable and a reproducible virtual development environment shared among all team members. This is a context where Vagrant comes into play.


If you have stack that involves many applications like PHP, Nginx, PHP-Fpm, Mysql, Rabbit MQ, Redis etc then making sure your team (even a small one with 3-4 members) have the same version for all above software will surely be a pain you don't want to take care of.

This post is going to be developer's perspective on using Vagrant as a virtualized development environment with minimal mention and coverage of the devOps and system side of Vagrant.

Bootstrapping a tech start up with limited financial resources is always a difficult task in hand. You have to find the right balance between the cost and the benefit of the money spent. As a new entrepreneur if you could get some great software for the price of 0 that would really expedite the tech related company bootstrapping process.

Introduction

In this context lets discuss about some free software that will really help you get some amazing benefits. I would like to keep this post as programming language agnostic as possible. Subsequently, I believe though you don't need to pay for the software a good web host will be necessary that provides shell and software installation access (like Amazon AWS or Linode) to install the software mentioned later in this post.

This post is going to cover software/SAAS for Project Management , group chat and notification, source code collaboration with version control (git), deployment automation and error/log monitoring of the deployed application.

In the past 12 months the popularity of AngularJs has exploded, which clearly hints that applications are being built following the multi-tire architecture. A good back-end API with a front end consumer application surely makes a capable duo that can handle any requirements of the application. If you have a multi-tire architecture then you don't need to rebuild the back-end for serving data for other applications like a mobile application or any data requirement.

Popularity of Angular JS, source Google Trends

Writing testable code is a harder target to achieve than just writing tests for the code written. You cannot write comprehensive tests that covers many function each of 200 or more lines and classes that measure 1000s of lines of code (LOC). Writing testable code is always important if you want to be able to test/unit test your code and be confident that nothing will break.

Tests also help a lot when you re-factor some code or write new features. If all the tests are passing you are quite sure that nothing is breaking. Seeing all tests come out green is a very good sight for us software engineer.