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Chapter 1 Development Concepts

Of course, an ever-increasing number of freely available tool function libraries exist,
but these will hardly satisfy all your needs, nor will they be optimized for your special
demands. Some libraries are also just too heavy to carry around—having to parse a
few hundred kilobytes of extra code every hit might significantly decrease the performance
of your site. In this situation, it pays to be able to replace a sub-optimal solution
with a 100% optimal solution that you created.
Larger projects offer even more opportunities for problems due to lack of planning.
Late in development, you might encounter difficulties that you didn’t or couldn’t foresee
because of the lack of work and time spent on the design.These difficulties might
be so severe that they require you to completely restructure the entire project. Imagine
a database-backed application that relies on an additional database abstraction layer.
The database abstraction layer accepts only textual data, but at a later point you notice
that you also need it to accept numeric data.You might enable it to accept numeric
data by workaround conversions, but at a later point discover that the workarounds
don’t satisfy your needs.The only thing you can do at this point is change the database
interface, which requires a rework of the abstraction layer as well as a check of all
calls to it in the main code—and of course the removal of the previously created
workarounds.
Hours or days of work spent on something that could have been avoided from the
very beginning—problems that often decide between success or failure, because time is
the most valuable resource that you will never have enough of.
The following sections guide you through most of the very basic, yet very important
practical issues of development: improving your code quality as well as basic
design and documentation issues. After covering these, we create an application programming
interface (API), taking the naïve, practical approach to familiarize you with
the new concepts, followed directly by an API creation from scratch, developing it theoretically
“on paper” and then nailing down a few practical principles to help you
implement your next API—matters of style, do’s and don’ts, as well as a few tricks of
the trade.
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