In the previous article we discussed how a user sends a request to a server by using URLs in a browser. Now we will explore what happens to that request once it leaves the user’s computer, how it travels through the Internet, and how it is protected.
Together with advances in transportation, the Internet made the world a much smaller place. As long as there is an Internet connection, your content or product can be accessed and purchased by anyone, anywhere.
As software developers making web applications, most of the time we are engrossed in our own code. Designing features, thinking of the best ways to build it, and fixing bugs are what we do most of the time. We often treat our application as a black box, a standalone unit that accepts requests and spits out JSON or HTML. However, this is a shortsighted way of doing web development.
In this series we will explore the realm beyond the application that we are building. We will think of this as the journey of a web request starting from the user’s Web Browser (User), as it traverses through the Internet (Transit), and finally when it reaches the backend (Server).
In recent years, it became easier and simpler to deploy and publish your application in the internet. Previously, you will need to purchase your own virtual machine, install libraries and then configure to deploy your application. This requires money, time, and expertise if you decide to do it yourself. Today there are lots of free (or cheap) services that will build and deploy your application in a click of a button or a code update.
In this article we will explore how we can deploy a simple frontend JavaScript application in AWS Amplify. While Amplify supports both frontend and backend services, we will focus on the frontend part. This is simpler to set up and already opens up a wide range of applications: your resume, portfolio, product page, and so on.
In the previous article we learned how to create a Rails 6 Docker image and run it locally. While useful for demonstration purposes, it is not enough for a real-world web application. In addition to our main application code, there are other services that we also need, like a database, a queue system, storage and so on.
Docker Compose provides a way for us to describe how our entire application works using declarative code. Declarative code means that we specify the final state of our application, rather than specifying what steps are needed to create our application. This results in a simpler, more intuitive configuration.
In the Introduction to Docker article, we developed a good basic foundational knowledge about container technology. Now, we will take it one step further by creating and running a Rails 6 application exclusively using Docker. As of this writing, Rails 6 is the latest version of the Ruby on Rails web application framework.
We learned previously that we can run Ruby code using Docker even without having Ruby in our local machine. We can also use the container’s shell and run commands directly in the container. Using these, let’s try to perform some commands in a container running Ruby 2.7: