Items tagged webdevelopment in Jan
Filters: Month: Jan × webdevelopment × Sorted by date
What is the best way one can expand his or her professional network?
Go to events—local meetups, conferences, tradeshows... there’s no better way of expanding your professional network than to attend events and build in-person relationships with people.
[... 46 words]What are the best free tutorials on HTML5?
Dive Into HTML5 and HTML5 Rocks are both outstanding.
[... 25 words]In simple terms, what is node.js?
It’s server-side programming, like PHP. The language you write the server-side code in is JavaScript (specifically the JavaScript version supported by Google’s V8 JavaScript engine, which was originally written for the Chrome web browser).
[... 46 words]Why did Twitter move away from being a single-page application?
Twitter is still a single page application, it’s just built properly now (one result of which is that you can’t easily tell).
[... 712 words]Does it still make sense to become a Java developer, or should I migrate to PHP or .NET?
It sounds like you need to expand your horizons a little further. The best programmers I know these days aren’t working solely in Java, PHP or .NET—they may use one those languages, but they’ll also be getting stuck in to dynamic languages such as Python, Ruby, JavaScript or Scala.
[... 222 words]What are the strategies for a front end developer to keep up to date with the emerging technologies?
Step one: find developers who you respect and subscribe to their blogs, follow them on Twitter/Google+/etc and try to understand what they are talking about and what they think is exciting.
[... 139 words]What are good ways to design a web application? Do you, for example, begin with a wire-frame of the front-end and work your way back to the database schema? The reverse? Figure out both ends and work towards the center?
I start with a working prototype, which I find I can often knock together in a couple of hours using Django. Having a functional (albeit buggy, ugly and insecure) prototype makes it much easier for me to start to reason about the larger application. There’s not much point in coming up with a comprehensive architecture plan only to find out you’re building the wrong thing!
[... 111 words]What (web) development platform has a low learning curve in terms of development, deployment, scalability, performance, and portability?
Sadly, none if them. Each of the things you list is almost a discipline in its own right, and there aren’t really any shortcuts—you just have to get stuck in and learn about them as and when they become a problem.
[... 67 words]Web Performance: What is the best way to measure page load times on different locations of the world?
Google Analytics has a built-in “Site Speed” report with a geographical map that can help with this (under Standard Reporting > CONTENT > Site Speed > Map Overlay).
[... 52 words]Is there a simple way to create a form that asks people to upload a picture and an answer to a question, and then gives me access to that info?
You could build this very easily using http://wufoo.com/—an online form building tool (with a superb interface).
[... 55 words]What are the pros and cons of open sourcing my website’s code?
I’m afraid if you’re expecting to open source your code as a magic bullet to get others to work on improving it for free you are likely to be disappointed.
[... 250 words]Which web frameworks should I focus on to make myself the most well rounded and to be able to solve the most problems as a web application developer/architect?
Being an expert web developer isn’t about which framework you know, it’s about the fundamentals. It’s important that you know how the tools you are using work, so you can fix things when they break—Joel Spolsky’s law of leaky abstractions is a great essay about this: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/ar...
[... 260 words]How is JSON different then a JavaScript (programming language) object?
JSON is a carefully selected subset of JavaScript. A JSON object can only consist of dictionaries, strings, numbers (in JavaScript floating point and integers are treated as the same thing), lists, booleans and null. The spec on JSON.org is a good guide: http://json.org/
[... 119 words]Are there any disadvantages to using domain hacks for your product website?
If you ever get written up
In the mainstream press you can almost guarantee that they will screw up the URL they publish (by sticking a .com on the end or fixing a deliberate misspelling). Sadly this still seems to be the case after 20 years of the Web!
What is the difference between XHTML 1.0 strict and transitional?
Not a lot. XHTML transitional lets you use a few presentational attributes and elements that aren’t available in XHTML strict. Here’s a more detailed overview from back in 2005: http://24ways.org/2005/transitio...
[... 59 words]What are the pros and cons of using Drupal as a web application framework?
The short answer: Drupal is a content management system that has slowly evolved in to a framework. This means that it comes with an enormous amount of functionality for free, but that’s also a huge amount of stuff that you have to understand and potentially work around as your custom requirements get more involved.
[... 95 words]Are there any good Django video tutorials?
ShowMeDo has 55 video screencasts covering all sorts of aspects of Django development: http://showmedo.com/videotutoria...
[... 56 words]How does Linkedin use Node.js?
They use it for the backed for their mobile app. Here’s an article with more information: http://venturebeat.com/2011/08/1...
[... 29 words]What kind of publicly available search software is able to be purchased or used freely as part of a website, and how good is it?
There are plenty of good open source options—Solr is currently my favourite. It’s extremely powerful but you do need to do some programming on top of it—I use Django and Haystack to build the search UI on most of my projects.
[... 115 words]What platform was YouTube using before they were acquired by Google?
It was written in Python—I don’t think they used any particular framework (they started the site in 2005).
[... 37 words]Are there any performance drawbacks when rendering DOM views at runtime with JavaScript, rather than rendering server-sent HTML?
Yes, there is quite a significant impact on first-load performance. The browser has to pull down all of the linked scripts before it can display any content—if you’re using a library like jquery that’s a sizeable chuck of code that has to be loaded and executed just on its own.
[... 152 words]How do you stay up to date with Open Source products and technologies?
Lots of blogs and RSS feeds—in particular, I subscribe to the feed of the authors of the software that I’m using, if I can find them.
[... 61 words]How does FriendFeed work, and what programming languages are used?
It was written in Python, using the Tornado asynchronous web server (which the FriendFeed team developed themselves). They used their own schemaless NoSQL-style store based on keeping serialized objects in MySQL.
[... 51 words]How are real time web applications achievable with PHP?
You don’t need to build your comet server using the same technology as the rest of your site.
[... 181 words]What makes mobile application backends different from Webapp backends?
Nothing at all.
[... 18 words]How can I determine which web server a particular website is using (Apache, IIS, Nginx, etc)?
If you’re on Linux or OS X, use curl with the -I option (to make a HEAD request and see the HTTP headers):
[... 63 words]Are there any summer conferences in the Bay Area for web development (or any other technology/Internet related topics)?
Have a browse through the list here: http://lanyrd.com/places/califor...—or filter by web development only: http://lanyrd.com/topics/web-dev...
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