i know i know this is a japapnese study forum but since ive been on this site for a few years and seen it grow due to one mans hard work i thought id get the best answer from him or from his supporters on the site. Basically ive done direct x games programming and could (note past, its been 5 years now) programme in c and a little class stuff but i know nothing about web development/design apart from keywords such as asp, sql, ruby and ajax oh and css etc.

what do you need to know to make a website? To make this site? what are all those things? what would you learn first? what are some good links etc. Id like to learn a few basics and see how i like it. I really enjoyed games programming as a hobby and web development has always interested me. Not dreaming of making some web 2.0 hit though, just educational purposes.

ive googled and wikied but the links are a little bit over my head. Looking for an overview really and i thought as i really know this site well and seen it grow an explanation of what was used to do what might help me understand a bit more about it.

Sorry, i apologise again not japanese related but it makes a break from hammering 50 kanji a day and listening to crystal kay on repeat mode (tomorow im going to sit down to West gate park with no subs)..

arigatou

Well... it's really not japanese related, but it's in the "General discussion", so one can't say it's not in the right place... ;-)

I think that you should start learning HTML. From that, you can learn (at least a bit of) javascript, and finally CGI (Common Gateway Interface) programming.

You can google for "HTML tutorial", "CGI tutorial", etc. and all the links you need will show up.

[kana]ganbare[/kana]!

The main technologies you need to know to make a site like this would be SQL, PHP, HTML, JavaScript, and a little web administration stuff such as Apache (or at least some unix). Probably some books would give you a better start than web tutorials, though I don't know what to recommend in terms of those things.

For basic HTML and a few other things I found this site great:
http://www.yourhtmlsource.com/

It'd also take UI design skills to make a site like this one!
Learn enabling techniques, create a do-nothing prototype with them and build from that.

I find a great place to go for this sort of thing to be http://www.webmonkey.com/.

Wow thanks for the replies. Actually i went away and did a bit more research. Ive heard Ajax used a lot, in fact i belive thats the culpit that stops this site being accessed from mobile phones etc, and i found out what its responsible for (as well as ruby on rails). I was wondering if i wanted to builid say something such as a forum like this or something like digg.com or delicous etc what would they use. And what would you use to programme the leitner system on this site? how would you store the info? how do all these things gel together??? HTML seems to be about the looks as is CSS but what do you use to make it function??

cheers for those links.. they look good. Once i get an overview of what everything does ill probably try a few of those tutorials.

right back onto kanji

Behind this website will be a database (one for the forum and one for reviews I'd guess). A quick google came up with this site which explains a bit about what databases are:
http://www.devshed.com/c/a/PHP/Website-D...and-MySQL/

I am a simple user...but as far as the forum is concerned, clicking on the PunBB link at the bottom of the page should tell you more about what's going on.

This forum, and most forums, are pre-made. As synewave pointed out, this one runs on PunBB, but I think that Mr. Fabrice did a bit of tweaking to get it to work with the user system and to give it a certain appearance.

PunBB is built in PHP as is the main site. PHP is a programming language that generates HTML as its output. It handles the brunt of the logic that takes place on the main site [that's what makes it "function"], using a database for storage of things (and interacting with a database usually involves SQL). If you want to do web programming you will need to learn one of the following to generate dynamic pages: PHP, Java Servlets, or CGI (a way of using traditional programming languages [C, C++, Python, Java] to produce HTML output). Then to know what kind of code to output, you will need to know some HTML and JavaScript. Ajax is an extra technology for doing things a little fancier but you can do almost anything without it.

So to sum up, HTML and JavaScript are unavoidable; you'll probably want to know SQL too; you will need to learn a dynamic web language (several possible options) and Ajax is a last optional bit once you've tackled everything else.

If you want my advice, after years of PHP programming for the web I eventually ditched it and now use Python and have not looked back. I believe it is a much better programming language, and the community around it is very different. PHP programmers tend to hack solutions together whereas most Python coders seem to take more care.

Also, you don't necessarily need to learn SQL to build a database driven site. If you use something like Django (http://www.djangoproject.com/) you can save your objects using some classes that hide the SQL for you. After writing queries to do simple things like get the attributes of your object and load, save or add new ones you will get sick of it pretty quickly Of course, you still can write your own queries if you really want to, but for simple things you won't need to.

I say skip the whole PHP/MySQL thing and go with Python and a web framework like Django. Or Ruby on Rails, I've never used Ruby or Ruby on Rails but from what I have seen it looks good. These frameworks will teach you good programming practices like seperating presentation (HTML) from the actual code that does the processing. You mentioned you already are a C programmer - from here everything else will look easy. If you can manage your own memory and deal with pointers etc. etc. I don't think making a web site/web application is going to cause you too much trouble Just start with the right tools (Python or Ruby and a good framework) and some tutorials (Python has a great book/tutorial online - http://www.diveintopython.org/)

I've also heard great things about TurboGears, and it helps you write AJAX-based applications too!
http://www.turbogears.org/

Another framework I intend to use myself, but might be a bit harder for a beginner to get into, is Divmod Nevow (also helps with AJAX if you're interested).
http://divmod.org/trac/wiki/DivmodNevow

So much PHP code out there is a mess of HTML, PHP code and SQL. It is possible to write good code in PHP, of course, but I really suggest you try Python or Ruby instead.

Google uses Python a fair bit, but as far as I know they don't use PHP. That should tell you something .

hey. Thanks for the info on Django.

I was thinking about writing some web apps, but didn't know any
good frameworks. Seems like Django would be a great choice(even
the creator of Python recommended it as the best python web app
framework during a recent conference! He said that he thinks Django developers
are one of the few that do open source the right way).

I was interested in learning Python anyway. I have some ideas for some Japanese related webapps for studying. Hopefully, no one will steal my ideas before I make them.... :-)

Btw, too bad "The Django Book" isn't ready yet.....just a couple more months.....

chamcham Wrote:Seems like Django would be a great choice(even the creator of Python recommended it...

Yeah that's what drew my attention towards it. I haven't used it for anything (yet) but it does look good and I trust Guido's recommendations. I've been working with the Twisted networking framwork recently and so am leaning towards using Divmod Nevow (same creator) for my next web app. I'm using Plone as well for something else but that beast, although powerful, is very very complex, and probably not worth it unless you really need its features.

Anyway, when it comes to web frameworks, I think the important things are providing a templating system, and a simple way to manage your data (this means automatically creating admin forms for you and providing some kind of easy way to persist/query your data) - and Django does this. I've done these things by hand before (back in my PHP days) and it takes 80% of the time of a typical webapp - and it's the boring bit too!

chamcham Wrote:"The Django Book" isn't ready yet.....just a couple more months.....

That's my metric for knowing when a project has a big enough following that you won't be alone when trying to learn about it - when there's a book written about it, it's big enough that someone will no doubt gone through the same problems you are and written a tutorial とか about it.

Anyway, it seems like the online docs are good, and don't forget mailing lists! They are a godsend for open source projects!

One of the good things of software engineering: you can do the same thing in a lot of different ways. :-) But that can also become a problem when you want to start: you have to choose one way.

"Language choice is a relatively subjective, almost religious issue" - John Shipman (this quote is so true).

You can write good or bad code in any language. For my work and personal stuff I'm using Perl, but when I need raw speed and memory efficiency I turn to C (or a mixture of Perl and C). I've been planning to try Python for quite some time, but I couldn't find any really good reason to do it (yet), so the only language I'm studying right now is Japanese... ;-) Or maybe I'm just unconsciously waiting for Perl 6. :-P

Actually, for someone new to Perl or Python, I'd suggest you to try Python (or Ruby, but I don't know if it supports Unicode, which can be a problem when dealing with Japanese text). Perl is a mature and very powerful language (it's said that you can write more functionality in less time), but it seems to take much more time to learn, too.

Ricardo Wrote:"Language choice is a relatively subjective, almost religious issue" - John Shipman (this quote is so true).

I second that! thegeezer3, almost every popular language has decent support for writing web applications these days, so it's just a matter of choosing the one that you like the best. Maybe try a few out, to see which works for you best.

This is a bit of an oversimplification, but if you know one of Python, Perl or Ruby then you probably don't need to worry about the other two. I wouldn't worry about Java or C++ unless you need to know them, since I would say programming in Perl/Python/Ruby is definitely more fun, but this is of course subjective.

And knowing C (as you do) is *great* as it gives you a strong basis and makes you a better all-round programmer (in my opinion) since you're used to thinking about managing your resources properly.

Hope we haven't confused you too much

wow yeah thats given me some good leads to follow on. From these replies i at least know which direction i am heading in. Before i was reading articles on all sorts of stuff not even knowing if its core stuff.

And ill say a sorry and thank you to the other users of the site for not flaming me for my offtopic post.

Thanks again.