Web Applications

[Guth]

I have always wondered what web applications are written in. For example a number plate designer?

Or sites like vistaprint where you can design products with your own images. It then shows your image on a cup, a teeshirt etc etc.

I know HTML/CSS and javascript but I'd say I'm an intermediate/basic user. I can design websites and have done 2 complete wordpress themes. However, I would have no idea how to write something like vistaprint.

EDIT:

I have been researching on google and it seems web apps are written in either Java or ASP.NET.

Is this correct and which one should I look at learning. Which is the easiest and which is the most valuable to know?

[Anton2k]

Hey Guth Alba Gu Br?th! i recently done a course at my university were we learned about web services and api's and all that malarky. Generaly web services are written in asp.net but u can write web services in just about any syntax, for example c#, i can't remember all the termanoligy but basically u can use any language to write a web service, visual studio makes it very easy using this thing called soap, you're probally best of reading about soap and building from there, if u have basic programming knowledge u will have no problem writing a web service, heck u can even write one in vb.net.

- Anton.

[Guth]

  On 15/10/2012 at 19:52, Anton2k said:

Hey Guth Alba Gu Br?th! i recently done a course at my university were we learned about web services and api's and all that malarky. Generaly web services are written in asp.net but u can write web services in just about any syntax, for example c#, i can't remember all the termanoligy but basically u can use any language to write a web service, visual studio makes it very easy using this thing called soap, you're probally best of reading about soap and building from there, if u have basic programming knowledge u will have no problem writing a web service, heck u can even write one in vb.net.

- Anton.

Thanks I'm going to look into ASP.NET and SOAP.

I have done web design for a few years now, just teaching myself. This is my first step into web development.

[Anton2k]

Ah cool, i was much the same, learning basic html web design back in the days of Macromedia Dreamweaver and Photoshop 7 lol! the good old days, also you should look into php, really good language for developing websites, really easy to learn as well, check out php academy on youtube he has a crap load of videos.

[Guth]

Yeah when I first started I used Macromedia Dreamweaver and Photoshop 7!

I love web design and I want to change my job full time to web design/development

As I said, I know HTML, CSS and javascript/jquery and I thought I knew a lot about web design. After a few hours of googling and learning about different languages it seems I don't!

Perhaps I know web design but not web development?

Yes I have used PHP, I know basic php.

However, PHP is for a totally different use than ASP.NET and JAVA?

PHP is just for dynamic pages? Not for web apps

[Anton2k]

Yea i would say u probably have the design part of the web nailed but as you say development is a different ball game, you can consider JavaScript and PHP to be web development languages which they are but more and more people are using web services aka web apps to get more dynamic and real time.

I guess what i am trying to say is web applications are mainly used for cross platform communication, i.e desktop applications, web apps (php), and mobile apps can all talks to web services to get data etc. Mebay this will make it a bit clearler because i think this may be where you are getting confused, a web app is something like http://gobarbra.com/ but a web service is generaly speaking something that is hidden on a web server somewhere or in the cloud that can do many different things, aslo if u are looking into services you should look into REST PUT POST GET DELETE < that's web services right there in a nut shell lol, at least thats what i was taught lol.

edit think a web service as a application c# vb.net or w/e on the internet that has methods that any one can use via REST.

[astropheed Veteran]

VistaPrint most likely used a combination of JS(jQuery) / ASP.net. I don't know for sure but if you look at the source code it seems to be JavaScript managing the image stuff, I didn't delve deeper because it doesn't really matter.

The point is you can use a lot of languages to build a website; I use HTML4/5, CSS2/3, JavaScript, jQuery, MySQL, PHP5, Python2/3, Flash (so, Actionscript2/3) for most things but I've also done some web apps in Java (but I avoid Java now if I can at all times for security reasons).

You could easily substitute really any damn language for server-side.. I've even gone so far as to use dBase for my cgi-bin... But I don't recommend that haha...

[IronSkull]

Tons of technologies could be used, they range from .NET to PHP. It's actually quite common for web applications to be written in PHP.

[Bag]

You can write web-services in pretty much anything if you want to. Most commonly its either PHP or JAVA, although a lot of enterprise stuff ends up in ASP.net. Ruby/node.js etc are also being used quite a lot these days.

Most people just go with what their familiar with.

Also. Please don't use SOAP. Its horrible, a nice simple restful web service is by far the better option IMO.

[+Nik Louch Subscriber²]

I write web apps in PHP, asp.net and maintain a few in classic ASP. I present them through HTML, JavaScript (jQuery) and CSS.

I genuinely wouldn't touch Java if you paid me. Personal choice though...

[threetonesun]

Vistaprint uses asp.net, you can check what any page uses by looking at the urls returned.

There's two sides to building a web application, the server side, where PHP is the most popular (or, most installed) language, but you can run Python, Ruby, Javascript, ASP... pretty much anything server side.

Client side it's javascript, and that's about it unless you're dealing with Flash.

[Guth]

This topic disappeared from my "Content I follow page" and I had forgotten about it, although I knew something was missing haha!

Thanks for the explanations guys.

I've been learning PHP for a while and I was going to try .net but It seems that PHP is more valuable than I realised and I think I should learn it first before trying any other server side languages? I only know basic PHP. I am quite good at editing what's already there (like modifying WordPress) but not so good at writing PHP from scratch.

Although I guess that's a natural learning curve, there was a time I couldn't write my own HTML but could understand someone else's by reading it.

[IronSkull]

PHP has a lot more support online as well.