Patterns and Architecture in Web Applications

Recently, I discovered for myself that apart from writing code and learning new technologies/using external APIs, there are things that are much more challenging.

These are things that need to be understood when developing medium to large projects. But even for relatively small projects, this is important.

Firstly, because it is impossible to accurately determine when a project transitions from small to medium/large.

Secondly, readability and comprehensibility are important for projects of any size.

As you may have guessed, I am talking about architecture and design patterns.

A design pattern is a reusable architectural solution. Different patterns can (and will) be used in different parts of an application.

Patterns are by no means a panacea. But they allow developers to quickly leverage the experience of solving complex problems by other programmers. Obviously, the developer needs to choose the most appropriate pattern for a specific task.

In such cases, this allows you to:

1. Improve the overall quality and readability of the code.

2. Optimize the code.

3. Save development time.

4. Reduce the number of errors.

5. Simplify maintenance and scalability.

Despite programming being a vast unpopulated island for creativity, there are still certain regularities. There is a high probability that someone has already solved your (or a similar) problem. And they have spent more time on it than you can afford right now. And they have more experience. And there is no need to repeat what has already been created before you, if you can stop at truly new/unexplored things.

It will also be easier for you to explain the workings of your application to another programmer.

There are not many potential negative consequences of using design patterns. The main problem is choosing the wrong pattern. It is also possible to degrade performance due to an increase in the number of abstraction layers, but in modern development, we don't consider this a big downside.

You may have already heard about many design patterns in web development, for example, MVC, Front Controller, Data Mapper, Active Record, DAO, etc.

Although patterns are a fairly general concept in programming, there are also some special patterns that are only used in certain programming languages (in practice).

Knowledge and understanding of patterns are important indicators of a developer's experience.

You can learn about patterns in detail in the book "Design Patterns" by Eric Freeman and others - it's more like a book of jokes than a programming book, and it's easy to read).