How do you create a mission-critical site that provides exceptional performance while remaining flexible, adaptable, and reliable 24/7? Written by the manager of a UI group at Yahoo!, Developing Large Web Applications offers practical steps for building rock-solid applications that remain effective even as you add features, functions, and users. You'll learn how to develop large web applications with the extreme precision required for other types of software.

* Avoid common coding and maintenance headaches as small websites add more pages, more code, and more programmers

* Get comprehensive solutions for refining HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, and Ajax for large-scale web applications

* Make changes in one place that ripple through all affected page elements

* Embrace the virtues of modularity, encapsulation, abstraction, and loosely coupled components

* Use tried-and-true techniques for managing data exchange, including working with forms and cookies

* Learn often-overlooked best practices in code management and software engineering

* Prepare your code to make performance enhancements and testing easier

Kyle Loudon is a software engineer at Matrix Semiconductor in Santa Clara, California, where he works with file systems and applications for memory chips. Prior to Matrix, Kyle developed platform software for embedded devices, including various wireless phones and the Apple iPod. He also led the graphical user interface group at Jeppesen Dataplan (now a part of Boeing), developed flight planning software, and created system software at IBM in the early 1990s. For the past several years, Kyle has taught object-oriented programming using C++ at the University of California, Santa Cruz Extension, and has worked with C++ since the beginning of its widespread use in 1990. Kyle is the author of Mastering Algorithms with C, also published by O'Reilly and Associates.

Foreword; Preface; Audience; Organization of This Book; Conventions Used in This Book; Using Code Examples; We'd Like to Hear From You; Safari® Books Online; Acknowledgments; Chapter 1: The Tenets; 1.1 Managing Complexity; 1.2 Modular Components; 1.3 Ten Tenets for Large Web Applications; Chapter 2: Object Orientation; 2.1 The Fundamentals of OOP; 2.2 Why Object Orientation?; 2.3 UML Class Diagrams; 2.4 Modeling a Web Page; 2.5 Writing the Code; 2.6 Achieving Modularity; 2.7 Object-Oriented PHP; 2.8 Object-Oriented JavaScript; Chapter 3: Large-Scale HTML; 3.1 Modular HTML; 3.2 HTML Tags; 3.3 XHTML; 3.4 RDFa; 3.5 HTML 5; Chapter 4: Large-Scale CSS; 4.1 Modular CSS; 4.2 Positioning Techniques; 4.3 Layouts and Containers; 4.4 Other Practices; Chapter 5: Large-Scale JavaScript; 5.1 Modular JavaScript; 5.2 Working with the DOM; 5.3 Working with Events; 5.4 Working with Animation; 5.5 An Example: Chained Selection Lists; Chapter 6: Data Management; 6.1 Dynamic Modules; 6.2 Data Managers; 6.3 Data Using SQL As a Source; 6.4 Data Using XML As a Source; 6.5 Data from Web Services; 6.6 Data in the JSON Format; 6.7 Cookies and Forms; Chapter 7: Large-Scale PHP; 7.1 Modular Web Pages; 7.2 Working with Pages; 7.3 Working with Modules; 7.4 Layouts and Containers; 7.5 Special Considerations; Chapter 8: Large-Scale Ajax; 8.1 In the Browser; 8.2 On the Server; 8.3 MVC and Ajax; Chapter 9: Performance; 9.1 Caching Opportunities; 9.2 Managing JavaScript; 9.3 Distribution of Assets; 9.4 Control Over Site Metrics; 9.5 Modular Testing; Chapter 10: Application Architecture; 10.1 Thinking Modularly; 10.2 Organizing Components; 10.3 Architecture and Maintenance; Colophon;