Carson Workshops - a Carson Systems Company

Workshop Survival Kit

Building Enterprise Web Apps on a Budget

Created by Cal Henderson, Flickr's Lead Developer

Photo of Cal Henderson This Survival Kit is packed with valuable information from Cal's workshop, "Building Enterprise Web Apps on a Budget".

There are three really valuable sections on this Survival Kit. They include: Code, Checklists and Helpful URLs.

This Survival Kit gathers some of Cal's best code, ideas and examples, into one useful place. It'll give you real-world code examples ranging all the way from the service monitoring checklists to an RFC822 email address matcher.

The Kit is aimed at developers who are either currently or planning to build a web app on a budget that needs to scale quickly. Cal's advice is invaluable.

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Past Reviews

"It was invaluable to get confirmation that other big players are using the same approaches as us." - Erki Esken, Skype

"Amazing! Thorough without being overwhelming" - Nicola Monat-Jacobs, New York University

"I gained tons of practical advice like how to scale your infrastructure. All valuable hands-on stuff" - Henrik Petersen, MTV

"Comparing Flickr’s architecture to our own gave us some really great ideas." - Richard Keen, Multimap

"Now I know how massive applications like Flickr really work – for us it’s the most valuable thing" - Kieran Bowler, Sequence.co.uk

"Well-paced, well-planned and very professionally delivered" - Mike Buzzard, Cuban Council

"The workshop was extremely useful and well organised. A great day, thanks!" - Duncan Ponting, BBC

"Getting into the nitty-gritty details and the reasons behind some of Flickr’s decisions was invaluable" - John Hornbaker, software architect

What's on the Kit?

Code - The code section contains code libraries and samples that may be useful when developing your own web applications.
  • Autolinking Library - r1.2 - The autolinking library takes the hard work out of presenting data containing user-entered URLs. The library can correctly identify nearly all email addresses and web URLs (with or without protocol), skipping over urls already within HTML.
  • XHTML filtering library - r1.9 - The XHTML filtering library allows you to let users enter HTML descriptions and messages without worrying about cross site scripting (XSS) issues.
  • RFC822 email address matcher - r2 - This RFC822 address matching library ensures that email addresses you recieve really are valid.
  • Flickr API class (PHP) - v1.6 - This PHP Pear class allows you to rapidly build applications using the Flickr API, including the Authentication API, without worrying about protocols or parsing.
  • Flickr API class (Perl) - v0.07 - This Perl CPAN module allows you to rapidly build applications using the Flickr API, including the Authentication API, without worrying about protocols or parsing.
  • Namespace aware PEAR XML parser - This PHP Pear class is a modified version of the regular Pear XML parser, but allows for namespace-aware XML parsing - particularly useful for dealing with SOAP or Atom.
  • PEAR Atom parser - This PHP Pear class is based on the Pear RSS parser (and shares the same interface), but allows you to parse Atom feeds into a simple-to-use array of items.
Checklists - The checklist section contains four important checklists for the development and maintenance of a web application.
  • Basic web app checklist
  • Business continuity checklist
  • Service monitoring checklist
URLs - The URLs section contains lists of useful links. They're organised by topic and technology.
  • Hardware & software load balancers
  • Source Control
  • Bug trackers
  • Unicode
  • RFCs
  • Debugging
  • Caching
  • Monitoring
  • Database federation
  • SANs
  • Feed formats
  • APIs

More on the author

Cal HendersonCal Henderson

Cal Henderson says he's been a web applications developer for far too long and thinks he should really start looking for a serious job.

Originally from London, he currently works at Yahoo! Inc, makers of Flickr, in Sunnyvale, California. He's been working on Flickr from day one (on his laptop) to the present day (where it's now the "Official web site of the Internet").

Before Flickr, he was the technical director of Special Web Projects at Emap, a UK media company. By night he works for a whole slew of web sites and communities, including the creative community B3TA and his personal site, iamcal. In his spare time, he writes Windows software, develops web publishing tools, and writes occasional articles about web application development and security. And writes biographies in the third person.