What makes a web developer?

[TheIronStar]

I was once trained as a web developer, but it's been nearly a decade since I've done much of any of that stuff (although I've programmed in other environments until recently). I realized that if I wanted to even make a website of any kind today, I'd have forgotten most everything and it'd be incredibly crude (some would use the word "ghetto" to describe it).

What skills would a modern-age web developer, or at least a software developer who can do that sort of work, have? (I'm not asking out of interest in becoming one, but rather to get an idea of what I've forgotten; I look at my own coding background and I sometimes think that for every ability that I've worked on, too many others have rusted away.)

[Brutha]

What do you mean with the term?
Working on a big website like facebook, making websites for small business or affiliate marketing?

[TheIronStar]

Any and/or all of the above.

Basically, I've lost faith in my own ability to generate web content in general, and it's been rather disturbing realizing that, especially since I've been a coder in other software work and especially since I had been trained in that years ago.

I wouldn't know how to make a worthwhile website. Basically I'm rusted to obsolescence in that area and I'd like to know what'd be involved in becoming current.

[Brutha]

I think that it's pretty easy to take wordpress, joomla or drupal and create a templete with css/html for a website that some freelancer or small business that wants to have to advertise himself.

Understanding Search Engine Optimization is important if the website is supposed to be more than a business card.

If you want to program for a bigger website you might learn python, perl, ruby or php.

[TheIronStar]

Thanks. That's the sort of thing I was looking for.

I once studied PHP back in the day, though over the last several years most of what I'd been doing was unrelated to anything web-like (though coding itself is transferable).

[ixmatus]

The lines can get a little blurry with all of the 'tags' floating around... For example, my current title is Web Application Developer which, in my world, is more involved than your typical Web Developer. Behind the Web Developer you have the Webmaster.

Web Application Development involves much more than just basic PHP, MySQL, XHTML, CSS scripting (which is where I would place Web Developers, building small to medium sized sites with a minimal amount of server side crunching). Web Applications extend into the realm of being more than just a desktop app, they utilize the strengths of the inter-web and integrate a large set of technologies to enable desktop-like interactivity.

My title has also seeped into Systems Programmer from time to time - example: the last company I worked for had me build a geo-targeting Adserver with a population API - the only 'front-facing' side of the whole thing was the templates that got served out displaying the ads, the other 400,000 lines of code were all running on the server processing and serving requests.

So, the better question is, what do you want to do? Build websites with contact me forms and some simple interactivity, maybe a blog or news headline thingy here and there? Look into W3C XHTML Standards, PHP is by far the most used and mature language when it comes scripting for the web, however, Python is more mature as a language in general, it is also a stronger general purpose programming language (my personal preference).

Ruby, I loathe. That's more because I'm on the Python side of the holy war than for any rational reason.

Perl, I loathe more than Ruby for web scripting, do not use it, I will kill you in your sleep - Perl is a beautiful language for command line text processing, exactly what it was meant for; don't shoot yourself in the foot and use it for scripting web pages.

.NET: While I absolutely despise anything Microsoft related - they do unfortunately have some cool stuff. I would recommend sticking with open source because it gives you an open community and open tools; .NET can get expensive and it's closed source - a pain in the ass to change/fix anything or get help.

There are alot of little things to pickup too - stop using .gif, start using .png for icons and such, not just for the transparency support but also because .gif is just old and crufty. Again: W3C Standards - start using the proper DOCTYPES, put an XML declaration tag at the top of all your pages, learn about XML namespacing and XML Schema data types; learn that the recommended MIMETYPE for XHTML pages is application/xml+xhtml and *NOT* text/html. Also learn that unless you use the header() function in PHP to send the page content it will always by default use text/html (the little meta tag with the content-type declaration rarely matters and it's not what I'm talking about).

AJAX: Asynchronous Javascript And XML (more appropriately, AJAJ: Asynchronous Javascript And JSON) is in a whole world by itself - use something like jQuery or Mootools, stop using FCKEditor and TinyMCE (I hate those RTE's with a passion) they produce nasty markup and teach users that they can do Microsoft Word like things to internet content, when you should be using STYLESHEETS and not inline style markup.

Use Firefox with it's gazillions of wonderful extensions: Ubiquity, Web Developer Toolbar, Firebug, ShowIP, YSlow, Regex Tester, FireShot, FireCookie, Live HTTP Headers, NoScript, ShowMyIP, Source Viewer Tab, and TOR (for testing pages with different IP's).

Use Google Chrome for its incredible Javascript debugger (saved my life building that Adserver w/ Javascript widgets).

Get VirtualBox and install any other OS's you would want to test your web application on. Learn how to setup a Linux/FreeBSD Database/Sandbox server for development.

And last but not least: USE VERSION CONTROL SOFTWARE!!!!!! I personally use Subversion, some people like GIT, Mercurial, and Bazaar. Whichever one you choose, USE IT LIBERALLY. IT WILL SAVE YOUR LIFE (no joke).

Hope that helps, it was a bit of an off-the-top-of-my-head post, no real structure to it; reply if you want more specific info.

[TheIronStar]

Thanks for that explanation. Damn that's an extensive list.

Basically I was wondering what was necessary to become web-savvy again. Until recently I was working in programming (mostly Java work, and some database use), but I've been fearing that the longer I work on one aspect of software/tech work the more I forget about others, and I realized that I'd no longer be remotely current on many other aspects of software/tech development, and I was curious about what I'd have to learn again.

I'm not looking specifically to become a web application developer in particular; just wanted to know what's necessary to stay current.

Yeah, at my last job version control was damned important, and it sometimes got clumsy even with the stuff.

[ixmatus]

Staying current is a different story, I would simply follow some blogs with a feed reader, stay up-to-date on happenings over at the W3C; and play around with some of the languages/frameworks. Notably, Python + web.py and PHP + Kohana (google them, URL's aren't in my head).

I can assure you, systems programming is very different from web application development which is an entirely different discussion in itself (even a bit of a rant).

Version control can get clumsy at times - but having redundant backups of everything you have ever produced is worth it, IMHO.

[Cosine Jeremiah]

You cannot get out of knowing HTML and CSS to be an effective web programmer. Knowing some basic Javascript helps a lot, too. After that, pick some language suitable to your style (I'll defer to the other posts for providing a comprehensive list; I am partial to Ruby).

For version control, use either Git, Mercurial, or Bazaar-VCS. These are the latest generation in version control software and are somewhat equivalent to each other. Git is the most popular and using it would let you upload and share open source code on github.com, but I find it the most time consuming to learn and maintain. I prefer Bazaar-VCS because it makes logical default assumptions for you (i.e. ease of use), but then I have to translate my Bazaar-VCS repositories to Git repositories to share them on github.com.

[Dan.Linehan]

Knowing jquery, moo.fx and some basic PhP and mySQL will get you by.

[Markus Jais]

I think it's also important - beside what has already been said - to learn design patterns.
Most advanced developers know them and it can really increase your productivity while programming.

See here for an overview:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_...mputer_science)

To good books are:
Design Patterns In Ruby: Home
(uses Ruby, but the patterns can be used with every language)

Head First Design Patterns:
Head First Design Patterns | O'Reilly Media
good for beginners, uses Java. But again, the patterns can be used in any language.

There are many other books on the topic including books about design patterns for HTML/CSS.

check amazon.com for more.

Markus