A year ago, acquaintances asked me to make a website with dynamic content. Then I knew a little more about the Web than nothing, but it was interesting to try.



Under the impression of an inveterate C ++ programmer from the Web world, his own bikes, unusual solutions, resentment over and without. All emotions are in spoilers, so as not to burden the article.



I hope it will be interesting for Web developers to look at the attempts of C ++ nickname, and C ++ developers will learn something new for themselves.

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Selection of server-side tools

Being in firm confidence that you should not hammer nails with ++, PHP was chosen as the main development language. The rest of the languages ​​have lost comparisons on support, the number of articles and manuals, popularity.



The operating system for development was chosen by Ubuntu 14.04, the PostgreSQL database.



The web server was chosen nginx. Apache features would be redundant for a fairly simple project.

First disappointment

Putting PHP-fpm and writing “Hello world!” I was glad that everything was moving well, but then an article about the penetration test came across . From the article it became clear that the default PHP configuration is dangerous! After that, the day went on setting up PHP ... and in a month two more days. There is no firm conviction that everything is alright!



Very sad a lot of opportunities to shoot yourself in the leg in terms of security. But PHP is a language that was originally designed to work with the Web.

Client-side tools

After a dubious struggle with the configuration, it was decided to take a rest and estimate how the page should look. Informed about Bootstrap, I found a couple of page templates on it with not broken adaptive design, I chose a prettier one and began to customize it for the project.

CSS

Hands, coarsened from the brutal C ++, completely not suitable for working with the beautiful. It was extremely difficult to squeeze out anything worthwhile, the hours of painstaking work went into minimal correction of the design.



As a result, the following mechanism for working with design was developed:

• change mostly only icons and pictures
• if possible, use available styles
• add color through javascript animation
• as a last resort, minimally edit the CSS, keeping the original

Bootstrap

Bootstrap for CSS is like Boost for C ++. It’s hard to imagine how much effort goes away if you don’t use it. My insignificant CSS knowledge at that time was more than enough to start using it, customize it and even make a beautiful menu at the top of the page.

jQuery

jQuery is what javascript really should look like. Short function names, animation , easy access to and iteration over elements, abstraction over browser-specific things. Basics are understood in 15 minutes of reading the documentation.

Development

In the process of development, various problems and shortcomings of the selected tools and technologies began to manifest, faced with the lack of adequate implementations of basic things.

Oauth

The biggest problem was the authorization of users. It was decided to use third-party services for authorization, such as VKontakte, Twitter, Facebook, Yandex, MailRu, Odnoklassniki.



Suddenly it turned out that all known services see OAuth in their own way. The differences are not that very significant, but due to small details the development has turned into a real blood pressure !

• Yandex is the only one who makes redirects with OAuth
• Classmates do not calculate checksums like everyone else
• MailRu does not even calculate checksums like Odnoklassniki
• Google finds fault with trifles (which I honestly liked)

At the same time, all services have error messages that are absolutely not informative , and debugging PHP code is a separate pleasure, which is described below. In addition, the answers from all the services come in their own format , in no way similar to the formats of other services.

Php

With PHP, everything is pretty good - language is like a language. However, after C ++ it was unusual to work with an interpreted language: errors that in C ++ are at the compilation stage in PHP are only on runtime. Realized that C ++ - corrupts , allowing less time to spend checking for typos.





In PHP, the lack of a free debugger, the lack of a free development environment.

Slide show

For the slideshow from the pictures used Backstretch plugin. But I had to make a text slideshow by the very fact that I wanted to look good on small screens. If you do through the pictures would have to do pictures for different screen resolutions, but it is a long time.



Therefore, it was decided to place the beautiful layout of the text on Booststrap, and just hide the pieces of text and show by timer.

Optimization

A draft version of one of the pages weighed a few megabytes. Loaded up stupor for a long time. Pagespeed came to the rescue with his own tips.



But the greatest help was provided by the site TinyPNG , which using black magic and quantization squeezes pictures several times without loss of quality.

Internet Explorer - nyashka!

I am absolutely serious. Internet Explorer is great! Of course, not as a browser for the user , but as a means of debugging the site. Of course, not as a debugger or style inspector.



Internet Explorer - displays the site with virtually no CSS extensions, it is very picky about markup and loads pages for an incredibly long time. These are all pluses ! On it, you can make sure that the site is quickly displayed, that unclosed tags have not accidentally crept in to javascript. In the end, you can see how the site looks in the worst case, and that the content is still readable.

Results

Inexpressible sensations from touching a new world for me. The sensations are mostly positive, and the result of the work looks decent to my unassuming taste.