I have only very basic experience with HTML/CSS and have quite a bit of experience with testing software and web apps from a consumer perspective. I'd love to launch a web application that plays nicely with Google services, similar to some of the apps you'd find on the Google Apps Marketplace, such as ManyMoon, time to note, Socialwok, etc. I'm a huge Google fan and would like to build something that's well integrated with other Google services.
If you were a total beginner and wanted to build a complex app like one of examples above (project management, CRM, etc), where would you start?
If you worked your ass off 18 hours a day, 24/7, how fast could you do it?
I've dabbled into various languages and development frameworks, and read about which apps are using what languages but it's hard to figure out what would be most beneficial to jump into. Ruby on Rails, PHP, Google Web Toolkit, AppEngine. The list goes on and on. I want to be able to build and launch my own scalable web app.
Thanks.
One bit of advice: There is no shortcut for proper experience. It took me 4 years to come to a point where I can build enterprise level web apps - even though I had the dream of building one immediately, right from the beginning. Start small and build your way up.
Even though I did hate this advice when I was receiving it... Don't try to build the next Facebook platform right now.
Now, to answer your question:
Skills:
You must be absolutely clear about server-client interaction with respect to HTTP. You will never understand AJAX fully without understanding HTTP and behind the scenes of browsers. Note: being clear and knowing everything are two different things. Be clear about HTTP.
Learn about HTML/CSS and JavaScript standards to some extent to know that they bahave differently in different browsers. In the grand scheme of things, they are not that important if you are okay with some framework that handles these for you (I recommend JQuery and JQuery UI).
Learn a little about Linux, Apache, PHP.
How to go about it:
To develop web-apps, you could start with the LAMP stack - Linux + Apache + MySQL + PHP.
First build a small web app that does something trivial - like saving and retrieving user's stuff using AJAX and a nice UI or something. I'd recommend jQuery and jQueryUI for JavaScript and UI frameworks.
Then, build a small web app that just gets data from some Google service, given a user's credentials.. I am not Google expert but I guess Google provides APIs for some services(?).
Then build an app where two people can share their data coming from a Google's service or something to that effect.
Then add your own fancy stuff.
It goes on like that.
If you are a .Net person, you could go with.. Windows + IIS + MS SQL Server + ASP.Net3.5/VB/C#. Guess what? StackOverflow is build on that stack :)
Learning about and using an MVC framework is also a good idea - ASP.Net MVC or something similar for PHP.
Minor clarification - By Google-friendly did you mean SEO-friendly? If so, Google-friendly and web-app don't go well together.
It makes sense to build a Google-friendly website not a web-app.
I would start by
brainstorming a hands-on project
identify the skills you will need to achieve it
learn them as you work through the project
set progress goals and celebrate small victories
For most people 18 hrs/day 24/7 sounds a little overly optimistic. A reasonable goal would be to form an interesting project idea and research the needed skills the first week, work through a few tutorials and maybe apply your own functionality the second week, build something 'complete' the third week, then take a step back and take another look at your original goal.
As far as choosing a project, I find a notepad helps. I'll be somewhere and think, 'wouldn't it be nice if...' and I'll go look for a solution that provides that 'what if' and find it doesn't exist. So there you go.
I would also have a look to one of the top voted questions here on Stack Overflow:
What should a developer know before building a public web site.
Related
I am a computer science student in my senior year at my local university. I recently was hired on as an intern to create a mobile web application. The mobile web application is very simple; it needs to interface with a data base to both give a full data base view for an administrator and for end users to fill out a simple survey. I have never done anything in web development before, so I did a little research and the tools that kept coming up where html, css, java script, and php. However, I also ran into other tools with different applications, like AJAX with Jquery, HTML5, and micrsofts asp.net. I have a basic understanding of html and css, but I haven't committed to a development platform yet. I wanted some advice on which one to choose, based on the following criteria:
1) I want to develop a website that is device neutral. So I want it to work well on both desktops and mobile devices.
2) No one knows the future, but I would like to use the development platform that is likely to become or remain the standard in the future.
3) It needs to be available as a part of a standard server platform for a typical web host
4) It needs to be able to dynamically generate web content and interface with an SQL data base.
I would really appreciate some advice, input, ect. I don't know if I will pursue a career in web development, but sense I already have to learn at least one development platform, I figure I might as well learn the right one.
Thank you for any advice and input.
If you don't have a web developer background and don't want to spend time learning it thoroughly, I would recommend using Google's GWT. It provides you with all the tools to implement your application purely in Java, without caring too much about the front end. As the whole thing's in Java, all the SQL handling can be done there, with the results sent to the front end.
Then, you can add built-in elements (flexible tables, panels, buttons, images, etc.) to the app, again, using Java only. You can get some CSS templates from the web and apply the styles without any HTML knowledge at all.
Once ready, you can compile the whole thing into JavaScript, with several permutations of the code compatible with most of the modern browsers. Then all you have to do is to deploy these generated JavaScript and HTML files onto your HTTP server and enjoy :) You can also touch the HTML directly if you have something that can't be applied through GWT but in the case of a simple webapp this won't be the case...
I'm about to start developing a simple reporting tool for tasks in international projects. In a nutshell: using the tool, a project is created, defining team members, tasks, and work packages. Team members will be asked to periodically submit reports on the work they've done (related to tasks and/or work packages). These reports will be stored and accessed trough the tool.
I'll use Google App Engine (client requirement) and its datastore (using JDO). But I want to ask you for advice on the frontend part: JSP looks pretty messy for non Java developers... any other idea???
Thanks!!!
Seems like at the moment it's either java or python. However, you may want to look at Grails. GSPs might looks a little less 'messy'. I'm suggesting Grails based on your description of the project, that I suspect will turn out anything but simple later on. You might end up being glad for the mix of constraints and flexibility that Grails will afford.
JSP doesn't need to be any messier than other similar HTML presentation frameworks, it really comes down to implementation. That being said, it is old Java technology which means it's not being kept up to date, and finding a good single source of documentation is difficult.
If you don't want to use JSP, there are other frameworks you can use, you just need to make sure they're compatible with Google App Engine.
The new kid on the block is the Play framework, and that's a Java MVC framework similar to Ruby on Rails. You can find a tutorial here: http://viralpatel.net/blogs/first-play-framework-gae-siena-application-tutorial-example/
If you're going to use Spring, check out this question: Alternatives to JSP for Spring MVC view layer
For a front end developer, if the code is separated correctly, you won't have to know anything about Java since there shouldn't be any Java mixed in with the HTML. If that's your only worry, then I would just go with JSP to keep things simple unless the team has experience with another technology.
I am creating a website with a friend to try and make some money. Basically, we want to let users aggregate data from different social networking site's APIs (FaceBook, Twitter, etc.) and do some cool things with the data.
My non-developer friend is sold on the Google App Engine because it costs nothing at first, and then you pay as your traffic/data increases. I am torn. I like being able to bootstrap the business like that and have no startup costs (other than time) but I am worried about learning a whole new "programming world" as Joel Spolsky would put it.
I am so comfortable with C#, ASP.NET MVC and SQL Server that I think moving to something like Java or Python on top of BigTable would end up taking about 3x longer to develop (if not more).
Can anyone give me some guidance on this? Basically, I am wondering if there is any way I can have the following with the Microsoft stack:
Free hosting up to some limit of traffic
Ability to scale out at a cost similar to what Google offers with GAE (maybe the hosting service would need to have support for a good scalable persistence solution--like Couch DB?)
For #1, I am OK if that means hosting it on my own server for the ALPHA/BETA phases. For #2 I am hoping that there is a good hosting service out there who can put me on shared hosting servers and charge by the traffic. Does that exist? Thanks!
Unfortunately when it comes to a similar platform then you won't find a MS Stack version. Windows Azure comes close but this is more akin to Amazon's EC2.
The python stack in GAE is really easy to use and was able to make the transition quite quickly. Django is a MVC that is really popular and quite simple to use. It also gives you a ORM to write to BigTable which means you don't actually have to care about it.
The Java implementation is very similar and you can use really well know MVC frameworks for creating your app like Spring
I am also a .NET expert, but I have been using Python-AppEngine for hobby/entrepreneurial purposes specifically because it allows me to bootstrap an new web application at no initial cost. That is critical for me, as I have no budget at all for side projects, and so far, with many deployed AppEngine applications, I haven't spent a penny on it.
Learning a new language can seem like a drag at first, but I have come to find my new expertise in Python to be invaluable. Remember that the best and most employable developers are usually generalists with a broad and flexible palette of skills. My resume features C# and .NET as well as Python and Ruby/Ruby on Rails, and I have gotten very positive reaction from potential clients and employers.
Learning Python was dead easy. Getting a handle on WebOb and Django templates took more effort, but nothing extraordinary. Over time, I built up my own framework layer on top of those things that incorporates the best ideas from Rails and ASP.NET MVC that I missed. You can take a look at it on Google Code, and you will see a number of ideas that specifically borrowed from ASP.NET MVC.
After 9 month developing an enterprise application using MVC + JQuery our Management and stockholders interesting to convert and switch to silverlight! they think it's more powerful than Ajax, make development speed faster than our current solution, It's Windows and Web and less headache.
Unfortunately, our stockholders dos not know anything about web and stateless state of web application and they always compare with window applications.
But nobody in our team know anything about silverlight. I am not sure that is a good decision. I think we develop as fast as possible. we develop a great framework and code generator for fast develop.
Thanks and sorry for bad English.
Dumping what you have and going for a rebuild mid development is almost always a bad idea.
For a personal project, I did exactly this. It was originally built during the betas of asp.net MVC. I got the app to a stage where it was usable (actually I still use it daily), but it was nowhere near ready for the outside world. And this was the problem; it was going to take an enormous amount of work so that other people could use it...
When Silverlight 3 was announced, I literally grabbed the backend of the app - stuck RIA services in between and had a few screens up and running that day without any prior SL knowledge. I probably could have kept going down this path but something clicked when I started to realise the power of silverlight. The goal posts for my app moved, and I began a SL specific rewrite.
Since then, I've started re-writing about 5 times over. I guess I'm still just learning how to best build an app in SL, having spent the last 12 years or so of my career working on stateless web apps, there was a big mental shift involved.
I'm a much better web developer then I am a silverlight developer, but if it was for a real project (rather then a pet side project) - it would have been shipped and out the door by now.
I'm convinced that SL is the ideal platform for most web applications (as long as it being a plugin isn't going to be any issue).
With that said, shipping is still the most important thing. SL is great, but the learning curve is steep. If you guys are anywhere near completing the app, I'd insist you forge on with mvc and maybe get someone to build a SL branch.
Re-platform an application is always costly, although if you've got your MVC right it should theoretically be easier to replace the "VIEW" part of the application with something else.
As to whether Silverlight offers you more than HTML / JavaScript is down to what you're using it for. If what you are doing is media-related or highly graphical, Silverlight might be a good choice. If your application is like most business apps (i.e. some input fields backed by some read / write to database) Silverlight doesn't really offer any tangible time saving for this kind of operation.
If the web application is public and you care about search engine indexing, semantic HTML offers the best possible option.
Has anybody got any real world stories build mobile web sites with NetBiscuits?
Someone told me it was the next big thing in mobile development (http://www.netbiscuits.com/home) and it looks pretty good from their site. Just wondered if anybody (besides them) has actually used it.
From a few months time working with it, I can say that they're indeed one of the best (if not the best) out there. The support is also insanely quick and good.
Only thing making me stop using it is the price. Especially if you're a small company and want to use their POI feature.
However I have yet to find a good replacement. May end up rolling my own version...
Edit: Related question.
They have created an entire xml (bml) based markup language that emulates html that has a very steep learning curve. I would seriously reconsider using it.
I have seen it working nicely. It also supports ASP.NET controls SDK that can be used to write ASP.NET app from Visual Studio. Once this app is deployed on your premise, you can use live bridge agent to connect this app to a Live Bridge server that Net Biscuits hosts. Your app is called a backend app in this case. This is a very useful feature when you do want to have Forms capability in your app and also want it to be accessible on NetBiscuits platform.
Check http://kb.netbiscuits.com/tactile/edc/livebridge_help.html. BiscuitML is also easier to grasp.
Look out for performance issues though. Customers in Australia have had response time issues - probably due to the Cloud Platform being located in USA/UK.