I'am gonna illustrate my technique to code less boring stuff in web in order to be able to focus on where the fun is : THE BACKEND !
For this journey we are gonna reason by working in the « direction of the wood », meaning trying to assess how to take advantage of the whole web stack.
I don't know how you begin a web project, but having been raised and taught some nice tricks by my fellow frontend coders, I like to begin with the most concrete : a form to put stuff in the system.
The form gives me the text step (action) to code which is the backend controler.
By reading the form I can guess each form goes in a « record » that looks like a database table, and each input in a column.
For the sake of discussion, let's use a SGDBR as a backend we miss a lot of features of a column like : is it nullable, does it have an ondelete cascade clause, a default value, a foreign/primary key constraint.
But ... we can still add non HTML5 attributes to the input and regular browser will hide them while they are still in the DOM.
So, it's totally ok with any HTML parser/browser to write
<form action=/comment >
<input type="datetime-local" name=created_at_time default="func.now()" />
<input type=number name=id />
<input type=number name=user_id reference=user.id nullable=false />
<input type=number name=comment_id reference=comment.id ondelete=cascade >
<textarea name=message rows=10 cols=50 nullable=false ></textarea>
<input type=url name=factoid />
<select name="category" nullable=false >
<option value=comment >Comment</option>
<option value=story >Story</option>
<option value=story_item >Story Item</option>
<option value=delivery >Delivery</option>
<option value=answer >Answers</option>
<option value=question >Questions</option>
<option value=test >Tested</option>
<option value=finish >Finish</option>
</select>
</form>
which ... with some tricks of JS/CSS is presented this way :
You can set by convention that id is a primary key, it won't shock anyone.
Which generates with an easy to write html parser the following SQL :
CREATE TABLE comment ( created_at_time DATETIME DEFAULT (CURRENT_TIMESTAMP), id INTEGER NOT NULL, user_id INTEGER NOT NULL, comment_id INTEGER, message VARCHAR(500) NOT NULL, factoid TEXT, category TEXT NOT NULL, PRIMARY KEY (id), FOREIGN KEY(user_id) REFERENCES user (id), FOREIGN KEY(comment_id) REFERENCES comment (id) ON DELETE cascade );you can use the non existings tags in HTML such as reference, ondelete to piggyback the lax HTML parsers we all use and infers 95% of all the data needed to set an SQL schema.
Given you have a set of convention based notably on the syntax of specialized input (such as datetime-local) for transtyping, then you not only advertise to user the data model, but also it's most accepted string encoding. Like for telephone, urls, dates in the standard of the WEB.
A textarea can be mapped because is has a size to a VARCHAR(column x raw), select box to enum (or else according to the SQL dialect) ...
With HTML as a model (which is a mean and not and end) we achieve at least one important part of SQL most important features : creating a concrete datastore without wich all is just abstraction.
Now we miss the delete/update/create/search that are expected at the end point ...
That's the easy part, just add a few input type=submit with the name of the operation and your controler can now deduce the operation from the name of the table given by the name of the form, with the parameters of the form as an input with the operation on the table described as the value of the input of type submit.
Writing a controler that does just this generically is quite a walk in the parc.
So then, you add a templating engine to write custom views, and you can copy paste your HTML form from your model/CRUD to have a ready to use human/ajax interface :D
Here are 2 examples of the form copy pasted :
It means that by sharing a single page you give to your partner the exact description to your data model to duplicate it locally and with the provided search endpoint given in the depedency order ... the mean to fully duplicate the WHOLE database.
Of course this makes storing password and private data a bit tricky :D
That you can solve by removing from search operation all column table having the word secret or private in it ...
I told you HTML as a model aka the View Controler Paradigm (getting rid of the M of MVC), VC : c'est pas à chier. And at the end you just need a few dozains of line of code to produce this interface having fun where it is :
