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I'm biting the bullet and becoming a Web Designer, there are just too many good opportunities out there. I'm a professional SW engineer, so I want approach this correctly. So far I'm fairly good at HTML/CSS/Javascript all completely by hand. I'm also good with jQuery and Django with mySql. I've made some cool sites but it takes TOO LONG if I want to do this for many sites.
Here is my question: Do I learn a CMS really well and use it (and be stuck with it) or do I spend that time developing some reusable HTML/CSS templates and do everything by hand?
So far my CMS experience is that there is overhead setting it up, and it you want a lot of customization you're doing CSS anyway.
If I go the CMS route -- which one?
What is the "best method" for Web Dev? I intend on creating a very diverse array of sites as well...
Thanks!!!
The future of web publishing is clearly in Content Management Systems for everything larger than a small personal site. People are not buying sites anymore for which they have to pay a professional every time a paragraph needs changing.
Make sure you know your HTML, CSS, and Javascript, but get familiar with one or more CMS's on the market, preferably one of the big ones that get you a big community, and the advantage of a widely known standard that it is easy to find people for. Learn how to customize it, how to build templates for it quickly and effectively.
One of the biggest flagships in enterprise-level CMS'es is certainly Drupal. From personal experience, I also know Joomla, but I'm not sure whether I'd recommend it to get started with - it tends to be a bit dirty on the code side sometimes. WordPress is successfully used as a CMS by many.
Look around on SO what systems people are happy with; if you want to get to know the concept of a certain CMS check out openSourceCMS who provide live demos of many CMS'es. There are also very robust commercial products out there that are better maintained than the open source projects.
There isn't a single correct answer for this IMHO. Basically, it comes down to:
Use the best tool for the job.
The best thing you can do for yourself is learn about what tools are available, and what they are capable of. Try to match each one to a scenario you think might be particularly suitable for a given solution.
You will find that if you invest a lot of time in learning something like Python / Django you will be able to create just about any site you can imagine, but then you might find that if all your client requires is a simple, mostly static company info site that something like Drupal might be more appropriate.
The baseline technologies like (X)HTML, JavaScript, CSS and SQL are used across all of them, so knowing these tools well in a generic context is also extremely valuable.
A truly well-equipped toolbelt is invaluable.
If you need a little number of pages, without any dynamics, render your site with your favorite language and numerous templates to html files and don't deal with anything but www-server.
Once you need a rather big site - use a tool which you already know well. (I using django and happy with it).
When a site is really huge - make your own CMS. But at first have a practice with tool like django. Until you know how it works - try not to deal with big projects at all.
I can advice to use statically typed language for anything, but i'm sure that you know benefits and caveats.
Python and Django is suitable almost for anything.
I am a Web Designer and recently I began using Wordpress. I've found it great so far, once I have my site ready in xHTML and CSS it only takes me a couple of hours to make the content editable.
I have also created about 3-5 themes my self, I've found creating Child Themes and using Themes like Twenty Ten as a parent, so I can use their functions etc.
I would highly suggest that you look into wordpress, especially if you want to speed up the process for creating websites.
Those two choices aren't mutually exclusive.
You should build reusable code regardless of which option you choose. With a CMS, there will already have some design decisions made for you of course, but I find myself building APIs and interfaces using Drupal all the time. In fact it's a measurement of quality.
There are also some frameworks that you might like too that will let you custom build and increase productivity. See The Zend PHP framework, Ruby on Rails, Kohana, Nanoc and the 960 CSS/HTML grid. You could say they are the best of both worlds!
If you are going to implement web sites for the general public, I'll go with Joomla. I managed to implement 9 websites in one year with this CMS. In my opinion, it is important to know PHP, HTML, CSS and Javascript pretty well before using Joomla (which you seem to know), or any other open source CMS for that matter. This way, you will be able to customize all aspects of the website (both frontend and backend) with ease. For example, when I don't find a plugin which does what I need, I just create the plugin myself.
However, if your aim is more on Web Applications rather than web sites, I'd go with ASP.NET and ExtJS, which seems to be today's trend for web applications since you will be combining the power of ASP.NET with the power of AJAX (ExtJs).
IMO, Python is more targeted for very large and complex projects (look at Google or Amazon).
Related
OK, the title is a bit misleading I suppose, but only because I'm not really sure how to condense down what I'm looking for.
Currently, I have my own personal site that I've built which rests on a CMS that I also built. I wasn't really interested in blogging when I started the site (it was mainly to showcase my Android apps), so I only added basic 'blogging' features like posting news items and such.
As of late, however, I have taken a keen interest in blogging, and would like to pursue it on my website. The issue I'm having is that I don't particularly want to invest the time it would take to expand upon my CMS to include things like archives, comments, search, and all of the other various blogging-related features that are standard.
So what I'm looking for is a blogging engine that I can plug into my existing site framework. I have found tons of services that are platforms that you build on top of (i.e Wordpress, Chyrp, and TextPattern just to name a few) but that's not what I want. I'm looking for something that I integrate into my site, not something I integrate my site into (if that makes sense).
So you want a third-party application that can plug in to a proprietary custom-built blogging/CMS framework? Unless you patterned your framework after some other publicly available and widely used framework then I think it is very unlikely that such a thing exists.
I'd suggest maybe seeing if there's a way to come up with a database migration script that will take the data that your custom framework is using and translate it into something that an existing blogging platform can understand. Then just completely replace your custom platform with the prebuilt one.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_web_application_frameworks
Since we are ambitiously aiming to be big, scalability is important, and so are globalization features. Since we are starting out without funding, price/performance and cost of licences/hardware is important. We definitely want to bring AJAX well present in the web interface. But apart from these, there's no further criteria I can come up with.
I'm most experienced with C#/ASP.net, PHP and Java, in that order, but don't turn down other languages (Ruby, Python, Scala, etc.).
How can we determine from the jungle of frameworks the one that suits best our goal?
What other questions should we be asking ourselves?
Reference material: articles, book recommendations, websites, etc.?
For me, the most important things to consider were:
Fantastic lead developers who I trust to keep working on the project.
Googling a question brings a lot of good answers.
Most importantly, I have to like the way the code flows.
Edit: Also they have to be anal about coding standards. If there is inconsistency, I get very annoyed.
Those 3 points brought me to Symfony. It is always using the latest cutting edge features of the latest PHP version. Symfony 2.0 is using namespaces before any other framework.
Two of your points were:
i18n - there is great support for it (helps that the company behind it is French, so i18n is a first class citizen).
Scales - Yahoo Answers and Vimeo use Symfony and contribute back code. If those guys can scale Symfony to 100 million users, you can too :)
It all depends on the type of project you will be developing.
Are you building a web application or a heavy content website or something else?
You also mix up programming languages with frameworks. The frameworks for PHP that I know are: CakePHP, CodeIgnitor, Zend and Symfony. For an out-of-the-box heavy content website I would suggest Drupal or Expression Engine.
It seems you won't be developing yourself. In that case I would determine the cost and availability of programmers and how widely the framework is supported and by who it is backed. The Zend framework is backed by the guys behind PHP, while CodeIgnitor is backed by the guys behind Expression Engine. Drupal has professional support packages,...
IMHO, for something that will have a lot of users, go for a compiled language.
If you don't try it, you will not know. So, I'd say do a small project in each of the frameworks you are seriously thinking about. I would prepare myself to do a lot of testing if it's something I'll be maintaining for some years. It's better to start off on the right foor than to get half way through a project only to realize you took the wrong path. There may be some requirements that end your search. For example, your servers' OS, a framework feature, or scalability. If you lay out your software plans and requirements, you probably will have very little left to choose from - unless your project really is quite generic or simple.
I am very curious about what you think is the best approach for people that want to start webdevelopment. I'm now talking about people that finished their education and so want to start from scratch.
I still have questions like:
Where do you start?
What software gets involved in webdevelopment?
What tools / setup would you recommend?
Offcourse i'm interested to hear alot more then only the answers to those three questions.
I am not writing this to get a load of people react on my post, i am trully interested in knowing how much work and money it will cost a webdeveloper when starting from scratch.
I hope to get a clear view on how to approach and to maybe hear some best practices.
Well one thing's for sure, education isn't finished! There's a whole lot to learn, and the more we learn the more we seem to need to learn.
If you're really starting from having no programming background whatsoever then I think you'd be advised to take a staged approach. For example:
1). A web page with a few different text formats and pictures and colours. Here you're just learning HTML. For that any browser and a notepad editor would do, but probably a tool such as Eclipse that gives some HTML editing capability would help.
2). More adaptive HTML - stylesheets that let you change appearance without changing all the html. So that's CSS.
3). Using the above, improve your designs. There are loads of formatting tricks good web sites use and you'll need to learn those.
Note that by now we've done a lot of study and we have not actually written any programs!
4). Dynamic web pages. Now we move to the programming side, rather than just writing some HTML files write a program that delivers the HTML and in some way changes the content. Starting with something really simple such as including "today's date is ..." on the page. For that You would need to pick a server development technology such as Ruby/Rails or PHP or Java/JSP ... You'll get a lot of different advise about "best" for this.
5). Now you can start to work on accepting input from the user and doing something with it so that useful work gets done. Things such as databases start to become important.
There's a whole load more after that, JavaScript and so on. An experienced programmer can pick up this kind of stuff quite quickly, if you've never done any programming at all then you will need to be prepared to take a while before you can get to the level you probably target. I think the key is to acknowledge that a great commercial web site reflects a lot of collective wisdom and skill picked up over many years, and probably is the result of a multi-disciplinary team working together. For one person to match that is a big ask. For one person to produce something nice and useful is more practical, but still does need a lot of different skills. It's quite reasonable to specilaise in a subset of the skills. For example, good visual designers write little or no code but are highly valuable.
you need:
a browser, eg. FireFox, Internet Explorer. A webdeveloper toolbar might also be useful.
a webserver, eg. Apache, Tomcat, IIS
a programming environment, eg. Php or ASP.NET
a development tool, eg. Notepad, Notepad++, Visual Studio .NET, Eclipse
most of the times a database, eg. SQL Server, mySQL
I'd say it depends what you want them to master: the technologies only (up to which skill level ?) or the whole software engineering behind a web project
A sample and fast technologies learning tree could be:
1) HTML
2) CSS
3) HTTP
4) Server side programming (PHP ?): programming concepts, interacting with HTML/CSS, then PHP API
5) Databases (start simply with MySQL for instance) + SQL (CRUD with Joins, Subselect, Indexes, Views and Transactions)
6) Client side programming (JavaScript first then Ajax)
7) A web framework (ZEND ? cake ?) and a good IDE (lots of...)
Full-time learning those technologies requires at least 1.5 year , based on the experience I have with my students and people must be trained mainly on concrete projects.
Then people should learn software engineering (cf link text) covering at least
- software requirements
- software design
- software construction
- software testing
I think people can have useful experience in this software engineering tree in 1 year and can (should) combine learning technologies with learning software engineering.
For training someone from scratch (technologies + software engineering) I'd say a least 2 years if working on at least three 6-month projects
This answer is Microsoft specific.
For starters you'll need an editor, a (optional) database and a few starting points.
Microsoft supplies most of these for free: you can download the Visual Studio Webdeveloper 2008 Express Edition for free, this includes most of the stuff you'll need.
If you plan on developing database driven websites, and who isn't, you might want to use the free SQL Server 2008 Express Edition
When you have the tools setup it's time to download some samples and see see how they work. Again Microsoft supplies some for free. You can check out tutorials and samples at their Asp.Net site.
When you are ready for some more advanced stuff, check out ASP.NET MVC, again at Microsoft.
With these tools and examples you should be able to get started.
I just want to add that you will most likely also need Photoshop or other tool to create the graphics for your web sites.
In spite of java/.net/php,the HTML,CSS,JavaScript are the basic web development toolkit.
Get a job as a junior developer that will put you on a project that is developing a web application. I personally think it should involve one of the two most established platforms, Java or .Net. I know some will disagree, but these are good foundations to branch into other tech platforms later.
Make sure you open an IDE (e.g. Visual Studio or Eclipse) everyday and code something. If not, find a new job immediately.
Read religiously at night. Start with "Code Complete", then move on to other books.
Learn the fundamental technologies of the World Wide Web:
HTTP
HTML
CSS
JavaScript
DNS, URL's
Good luck and happy travels!!
you need:
a google chrome . This provide you some advantage like inspect option. A webdeveloper toolbar might also be useful.
2. Html, Css, JavaScript are the basic language that you should be know
a programming environment, eg. Php or ASP.NET is needed for storing data and making login type page
a Visual Code Studio is needed for coding. This provide you emmet facilities that suggest you while you are coding
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Let's say I woke up today and wanted to create a clone of StackOverflow.com, and reap the financial windfall of millions $0.02 ad clicks. Where do I start?
My understanding of web technologies are:
HTML is what is ultimately displayed
CSS is a mechanism for making HTML look pleasing
ASP.NET lets you add functionality using .NET(?)
JavaScript does stuff
AJAX does asyncronous stuff
... and the list goes on!
To write a good website to I just need to buy seven books and read them all? Are Web 2.0 sites really the synergy of all these technologies?
Where does someone go to get started down the path to creating professional-looking web sites, and what steps are there along the way.
While I have built my knowledge largely based on using the internet to search out what I want to know (w3schools.com helped a lot, as did A List Apart), a few good books have helped me along the way, though they have been platform/language-specific, so I'll avoid mentioning them unless someone is curious. For me, at least, having a book open so that I don't have to resize windows or switch between them is very valuable.
The first part of your list is ok, but the last few items need tweaking. ASP.NET adds server-side functionality (for the most part) to your application. This lives outside of the browser and is thus quite powerful and easily shared with a variety of end-users.
The problem (some say) with server-side processing is that your application must make a new HTTP request when you ask for an action to be performed. So if you click on a link to a page that yields a new set of data, you don't get instant results. The page reloads, or loads a separate page.
Javascript solves this to a degree--it allows you to respond to user input instantaneously. Do you want to display the sum of two numbers when the user clicks a button? You can do it with Javascript.
The problem with Javascript is that it can't talk directly to databases, or explore your server's file system, or other stuff like that. It lives in the browser--period.
AJAX bridges the gap between your user's browser and your server. With AJAX, Javascript makes the HTTP request without refreshing your page or loading a new one. Javascript talks to a server-side script (not necessarily ASP, either--works with PHP, Rails, Coldfusion, etc.) and sends and receives information. And because Javascript isn't dependent on page loads, a quick, snappy AJAX script can almost give the feeling of a common desktop application, in which you don't have to wait for HTTP requests when performing simple actions on your application's data.
I think that this series of Opera Articles will give you a good idea of web standards and basic concepts of web development.
2014 update: the Opera docs were relocated in 2012 to this section of webplatform.org:
http://docs.webplatform.org/wiki/Main_Page
Ian's answer has a lot of weight. You could buy all those books and read them all and know nothing about web development. What you really need to do is start with something that is not nearly as big as Stack Overflow. Start with your personal site. Read some web dev/css articles on a list apart. Learn about doctypes and why to use them. Add some css and change the colors around. Go over to quirksmode and peruse the site. Add some js. Follow some links on Crockfords site. You will probably stumble across his awesome video lectures, which you should watch. Then after that go back to all the js that you wrote and rewrite it. Then pick a server side language that you want to learn. Python is pretty easy, but it really doesn't matter what you pick. Then come back and integrate all those together in your site. At this point you will at least be getting started with web development and will have worked with several different technologies.
EDIT: I forgot to mention. READ BOOKS.
Many developers that I have worked with in the past have gotten through their career without really advancing after a certain point. I could be totally wrong, but I attribute it to not reading enough books and relying on using their same bad code over and over.
You could go out and buy a bunch of books and start reading them and quickly get overwhelmed in the seemingly massive learning curve it takes to go from nowhere, which is where it appears you are, to a rich internet entrepreneur, which is where you want to be.
Alternatively, and what I would suggest is, you could define a problem you want to solve, and then go about finding the solution to that problem. Start with something small. "I have a problem: I don't have a web site about myself.". Define what you need to do to solve that problem, learn the basics, and do it. Then, define a new problem, which probably relies on the solution to the first problem, find what you need to do, and do it.
This is how all technology professionals evolve. My first website was a personal site with nothing but text. Then I added some jokes and some movie quotes. Then I got tired of man-handling all the updates to I learned how to put them into a database and retrieve them from the database for display. It goes on and on.
Call me when you've got more money from your financial windfall than you know what to do with.
If you really just want to jump in with both feet, I would suggest looking at ColdFusion from Adobe. The developer edition is free and runs on windows, os x and linux. The documentation is authoritative and extensive, there is a very active developer community and only a few books you might want to dig into. The definitive guide is a series of books that can be found on Amazon
The nice thing about ColdFusion is that you can use it as a stepping stone to other languages and remain productive along the way. You can even mix it together with Java since it is itself written in java. There are also lots of goodies built in that you would have to scour the web for or pay more for in other languages. Things like full text indexing, graphing, server monitoring, ajax based controls, flash/flex integration, asynch os calls, etc.
You even have the choice of building object oriented code or procedural code, although some people would not count that as a benefit. Those people rarely agree on which style should win, though.
Cheers!
I think sitepoint is the best resource for learning best practices in web development. They have great articles, good references, and probably one of the best forums. However the people there can be a bit grumpy. ;)
If you are a real nerd, reading the specs for HTML 5 and CSS is also a good way to learn.
I'm with Ian on this one. Reading books is all well and good, but nothing beats getting stuck in. I actually started with a Dummies Guide to ASP (that'd be "classic" ASP), back in 1999.
If I was going to start from scratch today I'd be looking at something that covered a full stack solution, whether Apache/PHP/MySQL, RoR or whatever.
ATM I have no experience of Rails, but it might be a pretty good place to start as it includes a lot of stuff that you'd have to figure out early on otherwise (integration with a Scriptaculous, a JS framework) - you can always learn what going on under the hood at a later date.
.NET is always an option, and if you're comfortable with Visual Studio it may be the way to go, but it's not the easiest thing to pick up otherwise.
If you know a bit of HTML but are basically new to server-side programming you might look at ColdFusion. It's actually extremely powerful and like Rails includes lots of "out of the box" benefits. There's a Swiss company called Railo who are currently in the process of releasing an Open Source ColdFusion engine that is affiliated with JBoss.
Last and not least - don't forget databases! Sooner or later you'll need to get to grips with some pretty serious SQL...
CFML (aka "ColdFusion" even though that's really an Adobe product, not the language) is definitely easy to learn, and if you want FOSS for CFML, in addition to Railo you can use Open BlueDragon which is a GPL CFML engine.
Designing with Web Standards is a great first read!
http://www.zeldman.com/dwws/
I would recommend this book:
http://www.amazon.com/MCTS-Self-Paced-Training-Exam-70-528/dp/0735623341/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1218830714&sr=8-1
I have just read it to take the exam, and although I knew the web theory part, I found it to be of great value.
This of course is a ASP.NET specific book, but that is what I would recommend learning anyways.
After you learn all the ASP.NET stuff, I would suggest reading up on JQuery.
Happy coding :)
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It looks interesting and I've played around with it some --- but the development IDE in a web browser seems to be nightmare eventually.
Does anyone have experience using it and what are your thoughts?
We evaluated GI a few months ago for a project but didn't end up selecting it.
The IDE-in-a-browser (which is itself build with GI) actually works surprisingly well, though there are some features you normally expect from an editor that it lacks, most notably (and irritatingly) an Undo command. It's also impossible to do things like subdocument includes (practically a necessity for team development) from the IDE, though you can do them manually in the underlying XML and the IDE will respect them.
In the end the main reason we didn't go with it was that it was difficult to make the resulting web application look as good as the designers really wanted. It was relatively easy to build functionality, but the components were very restrictive in look and feel. The way GI renders its own document model to HTML involves a lot of style attributes which makes skinning in CSS all but impossible. It seems to prefer making web applications that look like applications, instead of web applications that look like websites.
So it would probably be great for building intranet type applications where look and feel isn't a huge issue, but I probably wouldn't use it to make a public facing site.
By the way for those that don't know, TIBCO GI is a completely separate product from the rest of TIBCO's SOA business integration stuff - General Interface was a separate company that was acquired by TIBCO a couple of years ago.
From a coworker who used to work at TIBCO:
TIBCO is a complicated, hard to use system because it's used for complicated, hard to solve problems.
Kieron does a good job of summarizing GI. It's really for enterprise web applications, not consumer-y widgets. The overhead of loading the entire GI framework and waiting a second or two for it to load doesn;t seem like much if you're firing up a call center or an employee provisioning application you're going to use for the next few hours. But, it seems like forever if you're waiting for a widget to load into an existing web page. And, even though, GI supports some nice functional and performance QA tools, they really are overkill unless you're working on something important and complex. So, if all you want is to toss a sexy looking datepicker on screen, use something else for sure.
Yup, couldn't agree more. I have developed a few applications with TIBCO GI and integrated it with TIBCO CIM. I work for TIBCO and GI is something I have been working with quite heavily doing some complicated stuff. Whilst doing it, I came across the odd sides of GI, things you sometimes can't explain but are just the way they are, working with JavaScript and dealing with multithreading issues can be a nightmare etc. It's good to create something quick without being too fussy about the sexiness of the application hence good for internal apps but not for consumers unless you want to get lost in a jungle of crazy CSS styling. The XML Mapping utility is a great feature saving you lots of time to implement SOA applications. The other good part is that deployment is really easy - GI apps use a combination of XML, XSLT, X-Path and JavaScript. In GI 3.8 there are also a couple of testing tools. Unfortunately, development inside GI's editor is slow and painful, so I recommend using an external editor like Notepad++.
you dont need to run tibco-GI from a web-browser, but you need to run the Programfile GI_Builder.exe which is an ActiveX application. just double-click on it and run-it.