A few years back, I wrote a back end json service for a Delphi application using PHP. The advantage of using PHP was that it could be hosted anywhere that PHP and MySQL / MariaDB were available, opening up the possibility of using cheap shared hosting. This particular application however, required access to google API’s which used a white-list of server IP addresses as a security feature. This meant putting the application on a dedicated server. Times change, the google services that I’d used no longer exist, they were replaced by newer technology and thus this app will no longer function.
Several of my blog readers however, praised the video series. Occasionally I would take a wrong path during development, and then reverse that mistake out, and I edited the videos such that anyone watching would not have to waste time following such mistakes. Otherwise however, these videos were a recording of every key press during the development, as I narrate my own thought process while writing the code. This it seems, was appreciated. I have recently been focusing new attention on my now much neglected blog, and have been slowly reviewing old pages and posts. I have decided to preserve this video series here.
As with all code that I wrote years ago, I look back slightly embarrassed that I used to write code that way, and I expect many of you have had similar experiences looking back at your own earlier code. This is just the nature of programming, we never stop learning, and we are most critical of ourselves. The code here, as I’ve said above, will also no longer work due to API changes. The sources and scripts are no longer available. Still, hopefully if you decide to follow along with me, there will be something to learn, or at least some entertainment in picking fault with what I wrote.
As a side note – My Linode referral link is still valid. If you have need of dedicated hosting services, and use my link, you’d be, as the young ones say, “doing me a solid.” The kickback will help to pay my hosting costs for this blog and other related projects, thanks!
Contents:
- Part 01 – An introduction to Brutally Roll Your Own Back End.
- Part-02 – Configuring a LAMP stack using Brolly.
- Part-03 – The PHP work begins, and we start building a database.
- Part-04 – The PHP work continues, we’ll build an end-point.
- Part-05 – More PHP work as we complete the reusable end-point code.
- Part-06 – Broken promise! An hour more of PHP to add permissions and filtering on doRead()
- Part-07 – Getting to Delphi at last! Consuming our end-points.
- Part-08 – Event driven model, pushing HTTP into separate threads, and a U.I. “still responding” animation.
- Part-09 – Lets get that error checking in, and add the locations end-point.
- Part-10 – We add an input dialog for altering the regions and locations data.
- Part-11 – We complete the CRUD Client class with all methods.
- Part-12 – We complete the admin panel, and begin fleshing out the roaming panel of the truck app.
- Part-13 – We adapt both the PHP and Delphi code, to handle loyalty points and shift tracking.
- Part-14 – Prevent duplicate vouchers being generated, correctly allocate voucher points based on the currency spent. Very short start on the mobile notification application.
- Part-15 – Building the notification app UI.
- Part-16 – Repairing a small design flaw in the UI, and adding code to register the device with our server.
- Part-17 – We write the code for registering devices against the devices end-point.
- Part-18 – We write the code for loyalty points balances.
- Part-19 – We make a start on the sign-up and sign-in functions.
- Part-20 – We continue to flesh out the sign-up / sign-in functionality.
- Part-21 – Final Part! – We complete
