Lone programmer do front-end back-end together or one after another

Question

I use PHP with CodeIgniter(MVC framework). My Question is fairly simple. What according to you is the better approach while working with a slightly complicated website.

After planning, and listing all the small and big features of the website and where they are going to be and planning out the tables and columns for the database.

I would till now just start building one page at a time. Working on CSS issues, doing behaviour(JavaScript) and back-end at the same time.

In your experience, is it more efficient to do front-end completely deal with all issues, get everything done with. and then work on the back-end logic?

What about JavaScript? (Do only User interface related JavaScript + Validation with front-end -- and then do all AJAX calls and responses to it with the backend..?)

Answer 1

I would strongly recommend an iterative approach, where you develop both front end and back end incrementally.

Get something simple working on the back end that you can unit-test, then build a simple UI that interacts with this and implements the front end feature. Test thoroughly. Repeat until finished.

If you don't do this, then you will find it very hard to verify that functionality is working as you go along. As a result, gluing the pieces together at the end will be a nightmare: at best you'll spend a lot of time debugging, at worst you'll discover a major design flaw and have to rewrite large portions of your code base.