Now that I’m on my way in actually building the first version of the news harvest tool, I thought I’d say a bit about the software development process itself.
We’ve decided to build this web application using the Laravel application framework. Created in 2011, Laravel is written in the PHP programming language and used around the world for building everything from personal websites to SaaS applications to mission-critical business tools. It’s also a very stable framework with a large community of open source contributors and developers for hire, which means that finding people to add and maintain Laravel functionality is relatively easy compared to more specialized or proprietary tools. All of these things combined set it up as a good choice for the Bloomfield folks to build on in the long term.
In February, I wrote on my personal technology blog about the tools I use for Laravel-based projects, and the list remains applicable here:
To organize and track the work itself, since I’m the only developer working on the project, I’m mostly referring to the mockups, data model and then using a simple text file broken down into “DONE,” “TODO,” and “LATER” sections:
Continue reading Tools for building the software