Mastering System Analysis and Architecture: A Comprehensive Guide - Related to guide, system, response, architecture:, entries

Mastering System Analysis and Architecture: A Comprehensive Guide

System Analysis and Design has to do with studying and examining the existing system in order to understand the problems it might contain so to be able to create a superior tech solution for it.

Its like you building a new system for a school that works enhanced than the old one. This strategy is more efficient in a way that it uses a user-friendly way to help meet the needs of everyone.

There are mainly two parts involved in it:

There is the system analysis which requires one to examine who things look now and then see what is good and bad. Also engage with the consumers whether through observation or communicating with them to find out the needs and wants from the new system itself.

The other part is the system design which firstly requires one to outline the blueprint that is examining the requirements you collected from the analysis phase then based on those plan out how you going to make the new system work. Secondly would be a break down of the system, into smaller components so to be able to study them individually on how they would interact with one another.

Software Development Life Cycle is a structured process that is divided into four stages. Namely planning, creating, testing and deploying.

Planning deals with listing down the goals, scope and feasibility of the project. So say for instance, you want to plan on building a new mobile application, you first decide what it will do, who will be the target audiences and the amount of finances and time it will consume for you to develop it.

Secondly would be analysis where you would gather up what is required and study the system you are currently busy with. So if we were to put in a scenario of the mobile application, this is the part where you engage with the potential people through interviews to try and understand their needs and what they would prefer. You also try look at othet mobile applications that operate similarily to the one you ought to build and compare so you be able to see what works and what doesn't.

One of my favorite parts of the system development life cycle is the design phase where you design the system through means of creating these technical specification. Say with the web application this is basically where you design the database and then choose on which technology stack you will be utilizing for this part of development phase.

The implementation phase is basically involves coding and integrating the system. So with the web application this is where developers start being in action and they build backend, fontend and database and once you done building them individually, you integrate them together.

The testing phase simply makes sure that the system works as intended. This is where we check if there aren't any issues or bugs contained in the application. To make sure that everything works smoothly and accordingly, the developers test the performance, elements, and interaction of the user.

Deployment is all about releasing the system for usage. This is when the application is , the Apple App Store, or Google Play and can be downloaded.

Maintaining the system has to do with scanning through the system and seeing if there aren't any bugs after deployment. If there are bugs, then we fix the bugs and modification the available aspects on the system. In the scenario of software application development, this is the last phase where developers continue to monitor the performance of the system. They also continuously improve the application by means of adding new aspects, releasing updates to help fix the bugs and improving more on the user experience.

There are also 3 different types of models that fall under the Software Development Life Cycle:

The steps included under the waterfall model are requirement, design, implementation, testing, deployment and maintenance.

Practical example would be that of the above of building a house. You first gather what is needed to building the house like the deign, the number of rooms, the size of the house and then draw that on your architectural plan of it. What then follows is constructing the architectural design step by step, from outlining the base to completing the inside parts of the house. Once all completed, people can move into it and start utilizing it.

This model basically structures the system in an incremental format as it allows for revision based on user's feedback at each stage to take place.

Like this model deals with collecting feedback from consumers so to be able to improve on the system, like say for instance you are building an e-commerce website. Obviously you will start with a very simple product catalog and then start gathering feedback from the consumers. From the feedback you are able to implement a lot such as adding the user's account and a search functionality and then combining the two options. Each step will improve based on user's input.

This model basically concentrates on iterative progress, flexibility, and collaboration through frequent releases.

An example would be creating a new social media application and making sure it evolves to meet the needs of the clients through means of working closely with the developers and designers, keeping up intact with the new releases and versions of the app, and adding the functions and improvements.

There are also three diagram I not long ago learned about and those are Use Case diagrams, Entity-Relationship Diagrams and the Data Flow Diagrams.

So with the Use case diagram, it visually reveals how the user iteracts with the system. So basically the actors are the clients and different actions are the use cases.

Below is basically an example one would see when a person interacts with an online ordering system.

Actors are basically your delivery guy, admin and customer and then use cases are basically processes of placing the order, making payment, managing menu, assigning delivery and placing order.

The next one is the entity relationship diagram which visually show the relationships and data in a system. So basically this helps one understand how the database is organized and structured.

Entities is the order and customer. Attributes on the other hand are basically the properties which in this instance is the Customer's name and order ID and lastly is the relationships component which displays the interaction between entities and in this instance that is managers and places.

The last one is definitely the Data Flow Diagram(DFD) is simply a diagram that exhibits how data flows in a system.

This in terms of the food ordering scenario, is divided into four parts. First being processes that includes the enhancement order status component, view menu component, place order, make payment and assign delivery.

Another one that follows is the data stores that is basically deals with payment records, menu database and order database. Another one would be extenal entities like delivery person, customer, payment gateway and admin. The last component is the data flows which presents that the customer sending order details to order database, order database updates order status, payment gateway processes payment, delivery person receives delivery assignment.

My journey to learning all about system design and architecture continues, and if you have read till this far, please let me know what you think in the commentary section. Thank you!😊.

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Transitioning Top-Layer Entries And The Display Property In CSS

Transitioning Top-Layer Entries And The Display Property In CSS.

We are getting spoiled with so many new attributes involving animations with CSS, from @starting-style and transition-behavior — two properties that are absolutely welcome additions to your everyday work with CSS animations. We are getting spoiled with so many new attributes involving animations with CSS, from scroll-driven animations to view transitions , and plenty of things in between. But it’s not always the big attributes that make our everyday lives easier; sometimes, it’s those ease-of-life attributes that truly enhance our projects. In this article, Brecht De Ruyte puts two attributes on display:and— two properties that are absolutely welcome additions to your everyday work with CSS animations.

Animating from and to display: none; was something we could only achieve with JavaScript to change classes or create other hacks. The reason why we couldn’t do this in CSS is explained in the new CSS Transitions Level 2 specification:

“In Level 1 of this specification, transitions can only start during a style change event for elements that have a defined before-change style established by the previous style change event. That means a transition could not be started on an element that was not being rendered for the previous style change event.”.

In simple terms, this means that we couldn’t start a transition on an element that is hidden or that has just been created.

What Does transition-behavior: allow-discrete Do?

allow-discrete is a bit of a strange name for a CSS property value, right? We are going on about transitioning display: none , so why isn’t this named transition-behavior: allow-display instead? The reason is that this does a bit more than handling the CSS display property, as there are other “discrete” properties in CSS. A simple rule of thumb is that discrete properties do not transition but usually flip right away between two states. Other examples of discrete properties are visibility and mix-blend-mode . I’ll include an example of these at the end of this article.

To summarise, setting the transition-behavior property to allow-discrete allows us to tell the browser it can swap the values of a discrete property ([website], display , visibility , and mix-blend-mode ) at the 50% mark instead of the 0% mark of a transition.

The @starting-style rule defines the styles of an element right before it is rendered to the page. This is highly needed in combination with transition-behavior and this is why:

When an item is added to the DOM or is initially set to display: none , it needs some sort of “starting style” from which it needs to transition. To take the example further, popovers and dialog elements are added to a top layer which is a layer that is outside of your document flow, you can kind of look at it as a sibling of the element in your page’s structure. Now, when opening this dialog or popover, they get created inside that top layer, so they don’t have any styles to start transitioning from, which is why we set @starting-style . Don’t worry if all of this sounds a bit confusing. The demos might make it more clearly. The critical thing to know is that we can give the browser something to start the animation with since it otherwise has nothing to animate from.

At the moment of writing, the transition-behavior is available in Chrome, Edge, Safari, and Firefox. It’s the same for @starting-style , but Firefox currently does not support animating from display: none . But remember that everything in this article can be perfectly used as a progressive enhancement.

Now that we have the theory of all this behind us, let’s get practical. I’ll be covering three use cases in this article:

Animating from and to display: none in the DOM.

in the DOM. Animating dialogs and popovers entering and exiting the top layer.

More “discrete properties” we can handle.

Animating From And To display: none In The DOM.

For the first example, let’s take a look at @starting-style alone. I created this demo purely to explain the magic. Imagine you want two buttons on a page to add or remove list items inside of an unordered list.

Next, we add actions that add or remove those list items. This can be any method of your choosing, but for demo purposes, I quickly wrote a bit of JavaScript for it:

With this in place, we can write some CSS for our items to animate the removing part:

ul { li { transition: opacity [website], transform [website]; &.removing { opacity: 0; transform: translate(0, 50%); } } }.

This is great! Our .removing animation is already looking perfect, but what we were looking for here was a way to animate the entry of items coming inside of our DOM. For this, we will need to define those starting styles, as well as the final state of our list items.

First, let’s improvement the CSS to have the final state inside of that list item:

ul { li { opacity: 1; transform: translate(0, 0); transition: opacity [website], transform [website]; &.removing { opacity: 0; transform: translate(0, 50%); } } }.

Not much has changed, but now it’s up to us to let the browser know what the starting styles should be. We could set this the same way we did the .removing styles like so:

ul { li { opacity: 1; transform: translate(0, 0); transition: opacity [website], transform [website]; @starting-style { opacity: 0; transform: translate(0, 50%); } &.removing { opacity: 0; transform: translate(0, 50%); } } }.

Now we’ve let the browser know that the @starting-style should include zero opacity and be slightly nudged to the bottom using a transform . The final result is something like this:

But we don’t need to stop there! We could use different animations for entering and exiting. We could, for example, improvement our starting style to the following:

@starting-style { opacity: 0; transform: translate(0, -50%); }.

Doing this, the items will enter from the top and exit to the bottom. See the full example in this CodePen:

When To Use transition-behavior: allow-discrete.

In the previous example, we added and removed items from our DOM. In the next demo, we will show and hide items using the CSS display property. The basic setup is pretty much the same, except we will add eight list items to our DOM with the .hidden class attached to it:

Let’s put together everything we learned so far, add a @starting-style to our items, and do the basic setup in CSS:

ul { li { display: block; opacity: 1; transform: translate(0, 0); transition: opacity [website], transform [website]; @starting-style { opacity: 0; transform: translate(0, -50%); } &.hidden { display: none; opacity: 0; transform: translate(0, 50%); } } }.

This time, we have added the .hidden class, set it to display: none , and added the same opacity and transform declarations as we previously did with the .removing class in the last example. As you might expect, we get a nice fade-in for our items, but removing them is still very abrupt as we set our items directly to display: none .

This is where the transition-behavior property comes into play. To break it down a bit more, let’s remove the transition property shorthand of our previous CSS and open it up a bit:

ul { li { display: block; opacity: 1; transform: translate(0, 0); transition-property: opacity, transform; transition-duration: [website]; } }.

All that is left to do is transition the display property and set the transition-behavior property to allow-discrete :

ul { li { display: block; opacity: 1; transform: translate(0, 0); transition-property: opacity, transform, display; transition-duration: [website]; transition-behavior: allow-discrete; /* etc. */ } }.

We are now animating the element from display: none , and the result is exactly as we wanted it:

We can use the transition shorthand property to make our code a little less verbose:

transition: opacity [website], transform [website], display [website] allow-discrete;

You can add allow-discrete in there. But if you do, take note that if you declare a shorthand transition after transition-behavior , it will be overruled. So, instead of this:

transition-behavior: allow-discrete; transition: opacity [website], transform [website], display [website];

…we want to declare transition-behavior after the transition shorthand:

transition: opacity [website], transform [website], display [website]; transition-behavior: allow-discrete;

Otherwise, the transition shorthand property overrides transition-behavior .

Animating Dialogs And Popovers Entering And Exiting The Top Layer.

Let’s add a few use cases with dialogs and popovers. Dialogs and popovers are good examples because they get added to the top layer when opening them.

We’ve already likened the “top layer” to a sibling of the element, but you might also think of it as a special layer that sits above everything else on a web page. It’s like a transparent sheet that you can place over a drawing. Anything you draw on that sheet will be visible on top of the original drawing.

The original drawing, in this example, is the DOM. This means that the top layer is out of the document flow, which provides us with a few benefits. For example, as I stated before, dialogs and popovers are added to this top layer, and that makes perfect sense because they should always be on top of everything else. No more z-index: 9999 !

z-index is irrelevant : Elements on the top layer are always on top, regardless of their z-index value.

: Elements on the top layer are always on top, regardless of their value. DOM hierarchy doesn’t matter : An element’s position in the DOM doesn’t affect its stacking order on the top layer.

: An element’s position in the DOM doesn’t affect its stacking order on the top layer. Backdrops: We get access to a new ::backdrop pseudo-element that lets us style the area between the top layer and the DOM beneath it.

Hopefully, you are starting to understand the importance of the top layer and how we can transition elements in and out of it as we would with popovers and dialogues.

Transitioning The Dialog Element In The Top Layer.

The following HTML contains a button that opens a element, and that element contains another button that closes the . So, we have one button that opens the and one that closes it.

A lot is happening in HTML with invoker commands that will make the following step a bit easier, but for now, let’s add a bit of JavaScript to make this modal actually work:

I’m using the following styles as a starting point. Notice how I’m styling the ::backdrop as an added bonus!

dialog { padding: 30px; width: 100%; max-width: 600px; background: #fff; border-radius: 8px; border: 0; box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, [website] 0px 19px 38px, rgba(0, 0, 0, [website] 0px 15px 12px; &::backdrop { background-image: linear-gradient( 45deg in oklab, oklch(80% [website] 222) 0%, oklch(35% [website] 313) 100% ); } }.

This results in a pretty hard transition for the entry, meaning it’s not very smooth:

Let’s add transitions to this dialog element and the backdrop. I’m going a bit faster this time because by now, you likely see the pattern and know what’s happening:

dialog { opacity: 0; translate: 0 30%; transition-property: opacity, translate, display; transition-duration: [website]; transition-behavior: allow-discrete; &[open] { opacity: 1; translate: 0 0; @starting-style { opacity: 0; translate: 0 -30%; } } }.

When a dialog is open, the browser slaps an open attribute on it:

And that’s something else we can target with CSS, like dialog[open] . So, in this case, we need to set a @starting-style for when the dialog is in an open state.

Let’s add a transition for our backdrop while we’re at it:

dialog { /* etc. */ &::backdrop { opacity: 0; transition-property: opacity; transition-duration: 1s; } &[open] { /* etc. */ &::backdrop { opacity: [website]; @starting-style { opacity: 0; } } } }.

Now you’re probably thinking: A-ha! But you should have added the display property and the transition-behavior: allow-discrete on the backdrop!

But no, that is not the case. Even if I would change my backdrop pseudo-element to the following CSS, the result would stay the same:

&::backdrop { opacity: 0; transition-property: opacity, display; transition-duration: 1s; transition-behavior: allow-discrete; }.

It turns out that we are working with a ::backdrop and when working with a ::backdrop , we’re implicitly also working with the CSS overlay property, which specifies whether an element appearing in the top layer is currently rendered in the top layer.

And overlay just so happens to be another discrete property that we need to include in the transition-property declaration:

dialog { /* etc. */ &::backdrop { transition-property: opacity, display, overlay; /* etc. */ }.

Unfortunately, this is currently only supported in Chromium browsers, but it can be perfectly used as a progressive enhancement.

And, yes, we need to add it to the dialog styles as well:

dialog { transition-property: opacity, translate, display, overlay; /* etc. */ &::backdrop { transition-property: opacity, display, overlay; /* etc. */ }.

It’s pretty much the same thing for a popover instead of a dialog. I’m using the same technique, only working with popovers this time:

There are a few other discrete properties besides the ones we covered here. If you remember the second demo, where we transitioned some items from and to display: none , the same can be achieved with the visibility property instead. This can be handy for those cases where you want items to preserve space for the element’s box, even though it is invisible.

So, here’s the same example, only using visibility instead of display .

See the Pen [Transitioning the visibility property [forked]]([website]) by utilitybend. See the Pen Transitioning the visibility property [forked] by utilitybend.

The CSS mix-blend-mode property is another one that is considered discrete. To be completely honest, I can’t find a good use case for a demo. But I went ahead and created a somewhat trite example where two mix-blend-mode s switch right in the middle of the transition instead of right away.

See the Pen [Transitioning mix-blend-mode [forked]]([website]) by utilitybend. See the Pen Transitioning mix-blend-mode [forked] by utilitybend.

That’s an overview of how we can transition elements in and out of the top layer! In an ideal world, we could get away without needing a completely new property like transition-behavior just to transition otherwise “un-transitionable” properties, but here we are, and I’m glad we have it.

But we also got to learn about @starting-style and how it provides browsers with a set of styles that we can apply to the start of a transition for an element that’s in the top layer. Otherwise, the element has nothing to transition from at first render, and we’d have no way to transition them smoothly in and out of the top layer.

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Time To First Byte: Beyond Server Response Time

Time To First Byte: Beyond Server Response Time.

Optimizing web performance means looking beyond surface-level metrics. Time to First Byte (TTFB) is crucial, but improving it requires more than tweaking server response time. Matt Zeunert breaks down what TTFB is, what causes its poor score, and why reducing server response time alone isn’t enough for optimization and often won’t be the most impactful change you can make to your website. Optimizing web performance means looking beyond surface-level metrics. Time to First Byte (TTFB) is crucial, but improving it requires more than tweaking server response time. Matt Zeunert breaks down what TTFB is, what causes its poor score, and why reducing server response time alone isn’t enough for optimization and often won’t be the most impactful change you can make to your website.

Loading your website HTML quickly has a big impact on visitor experience. After all, no page content can be displayed until after the first chunk of the HTML has been loaded. That’s why the Time to First Byte (TTFB) metric is significant: it measures how soon after navigation the browser starts receiving the HTML response.

Generating the HTML document quickly plays a big part in minimizing TTFB delays. But actually, there’s a lot more to optimizing this metric. In this article, we’ll take a look at what else can cause poor TTFB and what you can do to fix it.

What Components Make Up The Time To First Byte Metric?

TTFB stands for Time to First Byte. But where does it measure from?

Different tools handle this differently. Some only count the time spent sending the HTTP request and getting a response, ignoring everything else that needs to happen first before the resource can be loaded. However, when looking at Google’s Core Web Vitals, TTFB starts from the time when the people start navigating to a new page. That means TTFB includes:

The actual request for the HTML document.

We can see an example of this in this request waterfall visualization.

The server response time here is only 183 milliseconds, or about 12% of the overall TTFB metric. Half of the time is instead spent on a cross-origin redirect — a separate HTTP request that returns a redirect response before we can even make the request that returns the website’s HTML code. And when we make that request, most of the time is spent on establishing the server connection.

Connecting to a server on the web typically takes three round trips on the network:

DNS: Looking up the server IP address. TCP: Establishing a reliable connection to the server. TLS: Creating a secure encrypted connection.

What Network Latency Means For Time To First Byte.

Let’s add up all the network round trips in the example above:

That means that before we even get the first response byte for our page we actually have to send data back and forth between the browser and a server eight times!

That’s where network latency comes in, or network round trip time (RTT) if we look at the time it takes to send data to a server and receive a response in the browser. On a high-latency connection with a 150 millisecond RTT, making those eight round trips will take [website] seconds. So, even if the server always responds instantly, we can’t get a TTFB lower than that number.

Network latency depends a lot on the geographic distances between the visitor’s device and the server the browser is connecting to. You can see the impact of that in practice by running a global TTFB test on a website. Here, I’ve tested a website that’s hosted in Brazil. We get good TTFB scores when testing from Brazil and the US East Coast. However, visitors from Europe, Asia, or Australia wait a while for the website to load.

What Content Delivery Networks Mean for Time to First Byte.

One way to speed up your website is by using a Content Delivery Network (CDN). These services provide a network of globally distributed server locations. Instead of each round trip going all the way to where your web application is hosted, browsers instead connect to a nearby CDN server (called an edge node). That greatly reduces the time spent on establishing the server connection, improving your overall TTFB metric.

By default, the actual HTML request still has to be sent to your web app. However, if your content isn’t dynamic, you can also cache responses at the CDN edge node. That way, the request can be served entirely through the CDN instead of data traveling all across the world.

If we run a TTFB test on a website that uses a CDN, we can see that each server response comes from a regional data center close to where the request was made. In many cases, we get a TTFB of under 200 milliseconds, thanks to the response already being cached at the edge node.

What you need to do to improve your website’s TTFB score depends on what its biggest contributing component is.

A lot of time is spent establishing the connection: Use a global CDN.

The server response is slow: Optimize your application code or cache the response.

or Redirects delay TTFB: Avoid chaining redirects and optimize the server returning the redirect response.

If you want to get a breakdown of what TTFB looks like for different visitors on your website, you need real user monitoring. That way, you can break down how visitor location, login status, or the referrer domain impact real user experience.

DebugBear can help you collect real user metrics for Time to First Byte, Google Core Web Vitals, and other page speed metrics. You can track individual TTFB components like TCP duration or redirect time and break down website performance by country, ad campaign, and more.

By looking at everything that’s involved in serving the first byte of a website to a visitor, we’ve seen that just reducing server response time isn’t enough and often won’t even be the most impactful change you can make on your website.

Just because your website is fast in one location doesn’t mean it’s fast for everyone, as website speed varies based on where the visitor is accessing your site from.

Content Delivery Networks are an incredibly powerful way to improve TTFB. Even if you don’t use any of their advanced capabilities, just using their global server network saves a lot of time when establishing a server connection.

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