Chapter 3. Building a Private App

We will be expanding the application we started in the previous chapter to include the ability to organize simple contests and select a winner. It'll start out as a private application tied to a development Shopify account. Later on, we'll refactor the code to support multiple shops and publish it in the Shopify App Store.

Even though the app will be simple and only take a few hours to build, we'll still use good development practices to ensure we create a solid foundation. There are many different approaches to software development and discussing even a fraction of them is beyond the scope of this book. Instead, we'll use a few common concepts, such as requirements gathering, milestones, Test-Driven Development (TDD), frequent code check-ins, and appropriate commenting/documentation. Personal discipline in following development procedures is one of the best things a developer can bring to a project; it is even more important than writing code.

This chapter...