Building An Application That Is Fast And Secure

It is quite easy to get started as a web or mobile application developer. Most of the coding skills required are easy to learn and ready to access. For web applications, tutorials for technologies like PHP, Ruby on Rails or Python are freely available on the internet for anybody to get started. Companies like Google and Apple have extensive tutorials for developers willing to build applications for their smartphone platforms.

While these various tools may help you build your first app, they are not always sufficient to ensure a scalable or secure platform. Scalability requires extensive work on the database infrastructure that can handle several million requests at any point in time. While a newly launched app does not exactly require that level of scalability, the back-end architecture should however make future work on database optimization and scalability improvement possible. Failing this, you may not only render a poor experience to your users, but also be forced to rebuild the app from scratch which will require exhaustive migration of all data from the old architecture to the new one. This can be quite painful especially if you are growing at a frenetic pace.

Security on the other hand is a lot more critical component of any app building process, regardless of whether it is used by a few dozens or by millions. Applications make use of highly private user access details like their email addresses, phone numbers, passwords and sometimes even more critical data like social security numbers and bank account details. Not securing an application enough, no matter how small, is a recipe for disaster.

Unfortunately, scalability and security cannot be learned merely through free online tutorials. In the case of security, this is an ever-evolving concept where it is a cat and mouse game between security experts and hackers. As a result, the skills required to build a scalable and secure solution only comes with experience and often requires the developers to be constantly on the toes to build applications that would be immune to all the recently detected security loopholes.

This is also the reason why programming experts who work on security and scalability of platforms are often among the highest paid in the industry. A lot of these job openings often require applicants to have secured certifications in vital areas of scalability, load balancing and security like the F5 Big IP Administrator certification or the (ISC)2 Web Application Security Certification. These are not merely exams to pass but require applicants to have completed significant number of hours working on the relevant networking or security related projects to be eligible for the certification.

While experience cannot be bought, developers can however work around this by adopting technology frameworks that promise the basic levels of scalability and security on applications. There are a number of application frameworks like HDIV, OWASP, JWIG and GuardRails that are geared towards providing application developers with a platform that will solve the vital scalability and security issues that could potentially plague your application even if you are not experienced enough to build them on your own. There are a lot of advantages to building an application from scratch. But time is a constraint and if you really do not have the know-how to build a foolproof application from scratch, it is a good idea to build your applications over a framework that will solve the critical issues.