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Learning web programming
Lurk
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
I haven’t done anything productive in regards to programming in a while and want to learn something new to get myself interested in it again. Anyone can recommend me a language and a tutorial to learn the kind of web development that builds sites similar to Wikipedia or Rotten Tomatoes. I have background in Java and C#.
Thanks in advance : D
Thanks in advance : D
Lurk on
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The big thing in web development right now is AJAX, with a lot of places starting to shift to WPF (including Silverlight, Microsoft's answer to Flash). The former is platform-agnostic but MS has their own version called ASP .NET AJAX which you would want to use with C#. The latter is obviously designed for the .NET platform alone.
Speaking of MVC, if you want to use your C# knowledge you can find it and tons of educational material about it at http://www.asp.net/mvc/. It removes much of the bloat that WebForms was responsible for, and generally behaves how most of the other popular web frameworks these days do. Another benefit of using the MVC framework is that if you would like to hone your architectural skills, the community around it is actually trying to promote some semblance of design patterns. Oh, and they open sourced it.
If you're looking for a Java analog to the aforementioned framework, you might try Spring. I hear many good things about it, and there is also a .NET version.
Other than that I hear positive things about ruby from a fun/productivity point of view, but sometimes you will see comment threads like this: http://www.infoq.com/articles/Netter-on-Rails.
whhaaaaaaaaaat. no, no you wouldn't. It's inexcusably bad and not using it doesn't really rob you of anything unless you are so dependent on the .NET form controls that you have no business writing web applications.
Learn Javascript. Learn real Javascript. It's not enough to just sling around jQuery. It will get you there, but knowing what's under the hood will always help you.
I like ASP.NET, however, it's probably the easiest framework to end up writing an absolutely unforgivably poor application in terms of performance and organization. It's also the easiest framework to get basic to intermediate data driven sites up on the web and be awesome. Since you know C#, it's probably best to go with it.
I hadn't been using it very much but my new job requires me to use it all the freaking time and I'm having fun at work
Mix in some javascript and you've got yourself a stew!
This - but it's not as big a curve as people seem to let on, especially if you have spent any time with a functional lanugage and a tree-type data structure.
After the point that you get that you can accomplish everything without variables, and thus with a potentially lower memory footprint, you can start making informed tradeoffs about your page's speed, and the convenience methods (Like $() instead of document.findById) will be much more appreciated.
PHP makes the baby Jesus cry. And PostgreSQL is fat better than anything less than MySQL 5 (seriously, no views? Foreign key checks? It's like... awful).
I'd second people talking about learning frameworks in real languages like C#, Java, Ruby, Python, or heck, even Scala (Lift).
I'm curious as to what you think is bad about using PHP for websites.
However, before that, it was dated.
But really..
myanswer = "this"."is"."why"."I"."hate"."php";
Fixed. Also: Heheh.
Namespaces in PHP are ugly and speak volumes about Zend's odd syntactical choices. I wonder if they think it actually increases readability, or if it's a technical issue with the interpreter.
It's OOP capabilites did dramatically improve with version 5, so it has that going for it.
PHP has its strengths and weaknesses. It's ridiculously easy to learn, and spits out results quickly. A beginner can make sites with very little effort immediately. Unfortunately, this ease of use comes with some drawbacks. It lacks a code-behind model. The quick results it rewards coders with, specifically stemming from the way PHP allows one to mix and match script code with markup, tends to make coders neglect the idea of code structure. Its bloated with redundant functions. Those functions don't all share the same naming scheme - there are just enough outliers to make me want to pull the rest of my hair out.
I don't hate PHP. But its piecemeal nature is obvious, and I find it to be lacking and ugly in certain areas.
This isn't really a thread to debate on this, but I'd like to know where you get this from. I lead a team writing enterprise web apps used in a corporation with thousands of international locations, and we heavily use ASP .NET AJAX. Of course we write our own extensions and modify things that don't suit us, but that's not unusual. Your assumptions are entertaining though :P
It's certainly not perfect, but no AJAX library is. Many corporations still use it heavily and/or exclusively so being familiar with it can be very helpful.
I am very interested in MVC that was mentioned earlier - it does have a much cleaner pattern than the previous frameworks. I'm hoping we get some licenses for VS 2010 soon so I can really dig into the new features.
Ditto here. I'd like to know if the MVC framework can be installed in Web Developer Express 2008.
I'm the lead javascript developer also for a large corporation, and everything I've seem from .NET AJAX is tripe. Especially from the AJAX Community Toolkit. Now, I understand that isn't code straight from Microsoft, but it is still sanctioned. My thesis would be that basically everything that .NET gives you that wouldn't have to be modified or extended could probably be written from scratch to perform faster and be more be even more extensible.
.NET writes code for you, and it's rarely good. We're talking about the same framework that forces an inline style of border:0px on every asp:image control with no way to turn it off and demands on act of congress to insert a label "Page:" into an asp:gridview paging footer.
The .NET framework is good but I find most of their controls to be absurd and subject to abuse.
But, I'm also someone who doesn't even use the jQuery AJAX methods because I enjoy the granularity that making it from scratch gives me. So that should give you some indication as to how much I would like .NET AJAX even if it were made of dark chocolate and raspberries.
What are you intending to do here?
I'd also suggest you learn database schema structure first (like Entity-Relationship diagrams). Good database form is a step far too many programmers don't treat with the level of respect it deserves, screwing them over later.
Also there's no point in worrying about Javascript at the start. Javascript is at the end of the road of web design. First you need to know how to make a page (HTML/CSS), then you can start doing server-side scripting (PHP/MySQL), and then you can worry about the flare Javascript offers.
And btw anyone throwing stones at PHP had better not act like Javascript isn't a fucking mess of a language. Javascript is by far the least fun language I've ever dealt with, and I had to learn COBOL.
I already know a decent amount of html/css, so PHP/MySQL is where I need to go then.
Also, should you pursue a career developing PHP, I'm going to warn you now: You will be required at some point to modify a third-party app (commercial or otherwise.) Simply because PHP so mind-numbingly accessible it will almost invariably be the worst shitpile of code you will have ever seen, until you have to look at the next custom/third party app.
If you don't have the patience to work with intolerably bad code then start looking elsewheres I suppose. I've never actually worked with ASP.NET extensively. I'm starting to think I should though.
Oh, hey I'm making a game! Check it out: Dr. Weirdo!
Facebook uses PHP too, but the reason that people like Digg and Facebook use PHP is because they are development gods and can bend LAMP to their dark purposes at will because they've been using it for the whole decade before other web technologies matured.
If you already have C# experience like the OP does there's really no reason to not use .NET.
LAMP is built for pure speed. PostgreSQL was always the better open-source database, but MySQL went faster (and web jockeys didn't care about views or data integrity... and still don't), so they went with that. I presume PHP was settled on for speed of development and scalability, not maintainability.
The benefits of some hacked together LAMP is a myth that we have fortunately all grown out of. That's why web frameworks like Ruby on Rails, Wicket, Lift, Django, Spring, Google Web Toolkit (I could do this for a long time) are all so popular, even for large traffic sites.
Digg and Facebook are really the last decent examples of LAMP, that I know of.
Needless to say, OP learns nothing about how to code well, and all about how to hack shit together. If that makes me a "snob", then so be it. Shit, even Perl programmers use MVC now (I know I did).
javascript for the 'front end'
php for the backend.
MySQL (or sqlite if a smaller site) for the data base.
You're entitled to your angry opinions, but at the end of the day anyone can go plug "php" into a job search engine and then some of your "so popular" solutions and get their own answer.
Also you should really drop lines like:
because it just makes you sound really dumb. As if using Python instead of PHP will make a bad coder great and nobody has ever written anything good in PHP.
Get over yourself, indie hipster of web tech.