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This is the first of a continuing series of articles that explore making a Web 2.0 application. The concepts are easy to put to use, and aren't that much different (in my opinion) of normal web architecture. In this series of articles I will be exploring my design and development a Web 2.0 application. In this first article I will be discussing the initial database design of com.pendio.us for insight on the choices that I have made for a new style of discussion board. While I am still actively developing com.pendio.us, (it is still rather buggy, but that is to be expected for a week old project) I thought it might be fun to discuss some of my design choices as a longer tutorial style entry. I will only be discussing the design of the actual application, please note that I am using several tools to speed my development:

Xaraya is used as my rapid application development platform. It is written in PHP and uses multiple Databases for it's back end. I believe most of the concepts that I will be exploring could easily be ported to other platforms, but Xaraya is the one that I am comfortable with. Any platform that gives you direct access to the output layer should work just fine. I needed something that would also send back my AJAX request in XML without a ton of work, and Xaraya fits the bill. For those that have never used Xaraya, there will be a learning curve for development, but the end time savings are considerable.

Just a note about Xaraya and this application that I have written, Xaraya offers many “hooks” that I could have used to save me even more time. I decided to write a completely stand alone application and thus I did not take as much advantage as I could have of the platform.

Prototype is being used as my Javascript library. There are many out there, but Prototype seems to be the best documented. In addition, there are many other libraries (as found on their main page) which build on top of Prototype for some amazing features.

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