UToobe media share application: a study of emerging web technologies

This report studies some of the latest web application development technologies. I have created UToobe, a media sharing web application that uses components of the MEAN stack, namely MongoDB, Express and Node.js, as a way of learning these technologies. The application allows users to search for media files uploaded by other users, view them, comment on them, rate them, as well as upload their own media and share it with others.

The primary goal of the project was to identify the challenges faced by Java Developers and explore the benefits and shortcomings of using the new technologies. With a professional background in Java development, I found working with JavaScript and the "callback" oriented style of Node.js to be a challenging paradigm shift. It gave me a completely new perspective on writing web services using REST and JSON. The inbuilt capabilities of frameworks like Bootstrap, and Jade helped give a very professional look and feel to the application. It was a good educational experience to learn about NoSQL databases, and how they are able to solve the problem of persisting unstructured and large data efficiently.

Based on the experience with the application, I feel the new technologies can cut down development time by two-third as compared to Java technologies. The current application has 1500 lines of code while a Java implementation of the same would have taken around 4500 lines of code. The new technologies also reduce the testing and deployment time by half.