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I am writing this to get a more realistic view of what I should be able to achieve.
I have been learning web development for just about a month now. Below are my level of proficiency on a scale of 1 to 10 (10 being not having to use google or ask a question on stackoverflow to solve all encountered issues)
Skills
Django: 5
jquery/ajax: 4.5 to 5
Html: 5
(just simple html code, having the "bone structure" of the site laid out without any fancy formatting or design)
using CSS: 0 (I think it's called css)
These are, from my understanding of the skills required to develop a site.
Am I a fast learner?
I started a month back at 0 in all categories (with limited to medium programming experience in other languages), I don't know if this counts as fast.
GOAL:
As a learning experience, I am trying to develop a news website where users subscribe to different news categories (ex: 'US news', 'Europe', 'Business'...) and they would get, in their news feed (a lot like facebook's news feed that automatically gets updated) feeds that are related to the categories they are subscribed to.
I haven't tackled website design yet; even though it is just for learning purposes, I would ultimately really like to have a nice design set up for the site, and deployed it on a server just so I would go through all the steps needed to actually launch a site.
I would really like to hear some feedback on feasibility/ get some insights on some of your personal professional experience on:
1- Hey is it feasible for a newbie to learn off the internet everything he needs to pull this off!!??
2- I am having a hard time putting a "deadline" to achieve this. How long will it take you to finish this? how long do you think it takes an almost complete novice to do this :)
Any other remarks/comments are welcome,
Thanks for sharing!!
-Rami
I think you may be over-rating your django skills a little there! I'd say someone is probably at 6/10, or 7, when they're relatively comfortable with the AOP parts of django - i.e. metaclasses, decorators, and so forth. That said, apologies if you are at this level!
I dare say what you'll find yourself doing is making the site so that it works - this won't take long at all - and then doing a ~huge re-write using more sophisticated code. And so on.
Another issue you may have with a dynamic site like this is database optimizations and, though not really applicable for a feeds-based site, caching. I'm currently working on doing optimizations on a large website, where the initial programmer didn't care about efficiency so long as it worked. So it became incredibly inefficient, some pages using 1000+ queries (though not bad code, at all, really) - some model methods potentially doing 50k+ queries (ouch!). Most optimizations were fairly trivial (select_related, annotate, aggregate, update, etc) - some were outside of the ORM's scope and required raw SQL and/or efficient c-based algorithms. The latter have sped some pages up from ~700queries/7seconds to 3queries in 0.4seconds - impossible to do in just django.
All in all, how long it'll take to make the website depends on your audience. If its for <100 users, then it won't take you long at all (apart from the design, I could spend years playing with css and my site would still look ugly) - if its intended for a much larger user-base, then you could be spending a lot longer on it... in my opinion!
1- Hey is it feasible for a newbie to
learn everything he needs of the
internet and pull this off!!??
Completely! The information is all there. Django is an extremely well documented framework. You might have to use the brain for specific actions but most of it already exists in the framework or by using plugins. The rest you already know. As for the CSS part, get a theme from some online site and adapt it to your needs. Keep backups to revert to in case you destroy something.
2- I am having a hard time putting a
"deadline" to achieve this. How long
will it take you to finish this? how
long do you think it takes an almost
complete novice to do this :)
Can't help you there.. No one works the same way and that will be based on your experience, knowledge, background and so on. Start doing it and adapt as you go.
Good luck!
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I want to make my career in ColdFusion. I'm trying to learn ColdFusion with this Book "Adobe ColdFusion 9 Web Application Construction Kit, Volume 1 - Getting Started"
So far I've reached Page - 350.
Anyways. I want a serious suggestions for making career as a ColdFusion Developer.
I need answers to these questions: (What I was really asking)
1) How much time would it take to master ColdFusion?
2) What frameworks are best?
3) What other technologies are required with ColdFusion?
4) What are your personal experiences as a ColdFusion Developer?
EDIT:
I know little bit of php and Java and when I compare it to ColdFusion, then ColdFusion seems to be a billion times easier than php. It's not that I don't like php, but just saying.
As I have some experience with Java I think it can help me with ColdFusion Development.
I planned to learn a new language once I do average with ColdFusion Development. Like Objective C. I don't know whether ColdFusion and iOS Development is a nice combination or not.
Programming is both an art and a science. I suggest you will never "master" it, and you should take on a mindset of always learning and growing.
A framework is a tool. Use the right tool for the job. Frameworks like FW/1 and Coldbox, though completely different, each serve a purpose.
You should probably spend some time learning about the environments you will run in. Web servers like Apache, Nginx, and IIS. ColdFusion runs on Java, so it wouldn't hurt to learn more about Java as a language, as well as Java EE servers like Tomcat, etc...
I make a living as a full time ColdFusion and .NET developer. CF doesn't always have a stellar reputation, but it can do job very well like most other web-based languages.
I would advice you never limit yourself to just one language/stack/OS/technology. Seeking out other perspectives only enhances your experience and ability.
I was able to create useful things in one day. (Thank you cfinclude). After 15 years, I am still mastering it. ColdFusion is a part of a technology stack. One does not learn ColdFusion on its own. It is ColdFusion + HTML, ColdFusion + SQL, ColdFusion + jQuery, ColdFusion + Java. Some of the more interesting recent (July 2013) work I have seen is ColdFusion + angular.js.
FW/1 works great for me
See 1 above. In 2013, the place where ColdFusion shines, is it can bring very diverse technologies together in a clean format.
This ColdFusion developer has had to deal with "Isn't ColdFusion dead?" for many, many years. At one time ColdFusion pushed the envelope in what was possible. Today, it doesn't. In many ways it is dead. Sure, Adobe is maintaining it. Railo is working on a very good clone. The momentum is not there.
In response to
3) What other technologies are required with ColdFusion?
A typical ColdFusion application will include a database. Learn data modelling. It's the most important piece of the puzzle. A good database design will make everything else so much easier. To this end, I've heard good things about the book, Database Design for Mere Mortals.
SQL is also important. If your applications include a database you will have to write queries. I've also heard good things about the book, Teach Yourself SQL in 10 minutes, by Ben Forta, who also wrote your WACK.
A typical ColdFusion application will include web pages. Learn html, javascript, and css.
Good luck.
It very much depends what type of work you want to do.
If you want to build websites then cf is not the best solution as it lacks just about everything in thia area fue to lack of open source apps and creates more work for you as a result compared to php, you would be better off mastering the popular cms and open source systems and things like jQuery, css, bootstrsp etc.
If you want to build bespoke applications and work on backend systems then cf is perfect for that type of work as you are builfing something from scratch so cf still gives you the RAD advantage.
If you like cf then you should Also should take a look at groovy, grails and railo.
I would suggest you look at what jobs are available in you area first before making a decision.
The other technologies you should learn depends again on what you want to do, front or backend.
At the very least ajax, jquery, sql, html and css need to be learnt, you can't do much webvwork without those.
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Is It possible to perform a system analysis and design for a Website ( particularly a social Network ) ?
What are the Expected contents will be , In the document ?
can u provide an example , please ?
{ I made a social network (www.sy-stu.com) as to be my graduation project and I want to add a full analysis study to the graduation document , I do have experience in UML and Usecases just the Idea of an analysis of a website is not clear and never perform one before }
thanx in advance
This sounds very ambitious, but I'm sure it's possible. Unfortunately, I've forgotten a bit of System Analysis, but do adhere to many of its guiding principles for my own projects. In fact, I would say that most data-driven Web sites are excellent candidates for Systems Analysis and should be used always during Web planning for any project you plan on putting into production.
Straight from the wiki:
The development of a feasibility
study, involving determining whether
a project is economically, socially,
technologically and organizationally
feasible.
Conducting fact-finding
measures, designed to ascertain the
requirements of the system's
end-users. These typically span
interviews, questionnaires, or
visual observations of work on the
existing system.
Gauging how the
end-users would operate the system
(in terms of general experience in
using computer hardware or
software), what the system would be
used for etc.
For the first point, I would analyze different technologies such as ASP.NET, Ruby on Rails and PHP. Each technology has its strengths and weaknesses. One key thing to keep in mind is if you plan on making your social network free, you may consider open source technologies over proprietary - as many servers and application frameworks for proprietary projects are costly. I would also consider Web startup and hosting fees. If you plan on getting a reseller account with Host Gator, then you would need to factor in monthly billing costs. If you plan to host your own servers, you may be amazed at the cost of doing so. For a truly stable system, you would need to put a lot of work and cash into managing your own Web servers.
For the second point, you could probably locate plenty of information on user requirements from similar sites - just check out forums for DIY social networks and see what people are having issues with in the Technical Support section. Obviously, looking into technology based articles and magazines would be a good place to search on end user expectations - or even just joining Facebook and Twitter - see what they are doing since people seem content.
For the third point, again you can consult your competition and see how the user interface works out. Is it easy to use? Is it difficult in some aspects? If you had to use their system for 8 hours a day at least 5 days a week, what would drive you mad and how would you do it better? And keep in mind logical work flow as well. Knowing your user base is important too. In some systems, you may be developing for other programmers. Using strong jargon may be fine, but for a social network you must remember that they aren't familiar with Web site data flow and terminology. So your controls should still make sense to a computer novice and still work securely (don't forget system security too!) and in an organized fashion.
Finally, remember that things happen. I recently created a back-end site for a client of mine. I though the system worked very well - and they were very pleased, but I just got an email today that they want the way order items are stored to work differently. This is why there's a maintenance aspect to the System Development Life Cycle - things change after you finish deploying. It could also be said that if I had communicated with my client's needs more closely, this could have been resolved. Fortunately, the change is relatively minor, and we do live in a real world where things don't always work as we expect. We just do our best :)
As I said earlier, Systems Analysis is a lot of work and should be. The point of it is to determine that what you are trying to accomplish is feasible and practical without committing to a long term project that could span years. And always remember that no plan is perfect. If there were perfect plans, we wouldn't need new systems :).
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I'm pretty handy with django and python but I'm terrible at the "visual" aspect of the web-design. Even after quite a bit of google-ing I haven't been able to find any sort of resource that has download-able templates complete with css, images, etc. that could be used to set up a basic website easily.
I'm looking for examples beyond the 5-line examples that you find in most tutorials ... I'm looking for something with the general nav-bar across the top, various content-blocks to over-ride through subclassing, footers, etc.
I've worked with others on django projects but always on the "coding side". I want to do my own project. I've set up all of the views, models, "business logic", I just cant get off the ground with the design section.
Any help would be appreciated.
Edit: Just to be a little more clear. I'm looking for designs (open licensed) ... akin to Wordpress themes. If you have a resource of just themes I can probably mung them into a django template but if you know of something that already provides them as templates I'd prefer that.
I've had some luck in the past with sites like OpenDesigns and FreeCSSTemplates -- they offer (mostly) CC-licensed HTML templates; you'll have to add the Django template stuff yourself. As James pointed out though, most of them will get you up and running, but you almost always want to take things a step further.
My advice: build up a small library of re-usable templates (using stuff from the above sites), get real comfortable editing HTML and CSS (because you will edit HTML and CSS), then find some kickass designers (preferably local) and get real friendly with them. Perhaps you can trade favors; you do some coding work for them, for free, and in return they do some design work for you. I've found that even if you have to pay, a good designer is well worth the money (seriously, who wants to spend their time testing sites in IE6?).
Good luck with your search though -- I, for one, would love to see your findings.
It seems like this is an area that is completely lacking. I've been looking for a django project, perhaps a meta-django project is a good way to go ;).
Maybe if designers could upload a set of templates against a simple and well defined set of models. They could upload a "main.html", "object_list.html", "object_detail.html", a css file and a few images. This would be something akin to the CSS Zen Garden project.
I've setup a github repository here: http://github.com/JudoWill/DjangoTemplateRepository. Feel free to log into the project and modify the wiki with requests.
The idea being to give newbies a starting point and a few examples for making their django website.
I suspect this has got nothing to do with django templates, your question sounds more of a design and markup. There are couple of css framework like Blueprint, 960, YAML.
I don't think you're going to be able to find what you're looking for unfortunately - I have the same problem.
Wordpress templates can assume a fairly well-known data model - every Wordpress installation uses the same predictable table names, every (say) blog page has a well-defined set of data that will be passed to the template - and even the plugins have only a limited number of plugin points to add extra data.
By contrast, your Django app could contain anything. I could provide you a pretty template, but unless the data I use in the template exactly matches your data model, it's not going to be useful. I could make the template very very generic - eg, just have it display the variable called 'form' if it's present, iterate over 'messages' if any are present at the top of the page, display a 'footer' at the bottom etc - but it will take you about 20 seconds before you want to customise the display of that form, and then you're back editing your own templates.
I think that the closest thing you're going to find are UI libraries like jQuery or YUI which can handle a lot of the work of making your UI look snazzy.
I'd like to be proven wrong though, it would save me going through the same trial as you're going through now.
Update: On re-reading this, it occurred to me that you're looking for a CMS, which Django is not. Two seconds of work with Google revealed django CMS. I haven't tried it, but maybe that's closer to what you're looking for? The django wiki has a comparison table of various django-based CMS solutions
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What features should "Tomorrow's" wikis include? How might they incorporate Web 2.0 features like AJAX? What other features are they currently missing? What do you want to see from the next release of your favorite Wiki?
Edit: How might a Wiki be integrated into other products? What "neat uses" could wikis have?
Preview-as-you-type works very nicely indeed here on Stack Overflow. Many wikis don't do that.
Make it really easy to link between pages, eg. that, as you type, the wiki finds likely pages you may be referring to. That way you can make links without having to know the exact title of a target page, and bouncing on the shift key to WriteInCamelCase, or throwing in square brackets. Make it very easy to link to other websites outside the wiki, too (and by "easy" I do not mean like wikisisters, which, if I remember correctly, is like foowiki:ALinkLikeThis).
Similarly, if you can generate links within text automatically, you could, for example, have a mail system that wikifies your email. You create a wiki page, say, for Joel Spolsky, and references to Joel emails in your inbox become links to that page, which you can find by clicking "what links here". (This probably needs something along the lines of Bayesian filtering to prune the stray references to other Joels... your Bayesian Classifier learns that if the context is smart and getting things done, it's Spolsky. If it's flying Viking kittens, it's morely likely Joel Veich).
A variety of RSS feeds for tracking changes would nice, too. (Diffs, full text, changes on pages I've edited, ...)
Wikipedia has grown a fairly colossal categorisation system ("Fictional Cats", anyone?); laying a taxonomy over a wiki's flat namespace could provide another way for users to find their way around. Wikipedia's doing this a little, but in fairly limited ways so far: there are links to the relevant category lists, but you can't, for example, look for a composer called "Smith".
Similarly, wikis give you this big graph of interconnected nodes, of how closely your community sees the relevant concepts as being. Is that interesting? Is that useful? Does anyone who isn't google want to think about this stuff?
PS. If you believe Paul Graham's definition of Web 2.0 as "Democracy, Don't Maltreat Users, and Javascript works now", wikis are two thirds Web 2.0 already.
I am personally already tired of wikis. Wiki as a software is outdated, now it is about wiki as a feature (like my favorite new website, stack overflow).
The main advantage of community wiki — more editing — came into existence when we introduced "Suggested Edits".
With "Suggested Edits", anyone, even an anonymous user, can edit anything — so long as another experienced user reviews and approves their edit.
I'm in the process of choosing a wiki tool, and have looked at numerous packages over the past week. I'm sure there are dozens I haven't even heard of yet, probably good ones. But in general, here's my "beginner's mind" take on the problem.
Wiki markup should be abandoned. A wiki that is limited to wiki markup will only be useful to 'nix hacks and others who get excited about doing things the hard way and insisting that everybody else is stupid. I mean, Morse code is fine with me personally; I don't get what was wrong with a nice, clean dash-dot-dash. Or smoke signals, they were nice, except for the carbon footprint. But times change, and we have to change with them.
Real users (business users, customers, clients) want rich text editing. Period. And when a wiki tries to support both rich text and wiki markup, the results are not pretty. The model is confusing and (apparently) difficult to implement. The fckeditor extension at wikiwiki is a nightmare, for example. It's just not worth it.
Wikis need better access control. The idea that all content should be open to everyone is fine for an open, public, non-profit wiki like this one. But in the business world, that's not how it works. Restricting access is not evil, it's reality. Wiki tools need to do a much better job of providing access control: access to pages and groups of pages based on role or group membership, where groups can be formed by anyone on an ad hoc basis and users can belong to multiple groups and pages can be accessible to multiple groups, at the whim of the page's creator.
Those are the two things that I want, above all else, and I haven't found it in open source, at least not out of the box. Which, of course, is why open source is open source.
There's been some interesting work using wikis for testing and software development. EG, movement towards literate programming -- allowing pages to exist as both code and documentation that is compiled down into one or the other (or, I suppose, both simultaneously).
They have a regular session about this at the annual WikiSym conference.
I think one direction of Wikis is going from open ended collections of documents to an "everyone can edit but with more structure" applications like SO.
Another direction that I've seen is more direct integration with other project support tools, so project planning, issue management, and all that stuff.
Personally, I think the next big direction is going to be some sort of multimedia based Wiki, not just a Wiki where multimedia can be embedded in the text.
I really like MediaWiki. It's widely used and free/Free. The markup syntax is straightforward and allows you to do enough basic styling that you don't need to use custom HTML or to use a WYSIWYG. I assume by "sexy web 2.0" you mean Flash/AJAX, but I like MediaWiki because it works cleanly with basic HTML/Javascript (you don't have to wait for custom widgets to load, etc...).
What makes wikis reach their potential of usefulness is the community that develops around them more than the software itself. You need to find a niche where people are both passionate about (but not criminally insane about) the central topic and have enough technical prowess to log on to a website and edit some text.
"Wiki" is ultimately just a pattern:
Open editing by all/most visitors
Integrated revision tracking and rollback to reduce the cost of mistakes
Simple syntax for cross-linking between articles, and auto-creation of stub articles when referenced
That's not a perfect description, but it's a combination that isn't particularly magic. Successful wikis combine those things with a critical mass of people creating and maintaining content.
The next step, IMO, is less about web 2.0 shininess and more about the integration of better structural information. Adding any metadata beyond "this points to that" is an exercise in brute force hand-markup. Maybe microformats? Maybe the development of more structured knowledgebase software that uses wiki-ish editing UI but a smarter backend? I'm not sure, but I think better handling of the structured data is really the next wave.
Extensibility.
Check out DekiWiki, they are doing an excellent job with this.
DekiWiki extensions
The wiki-of-the-future will be completely editable online, concurrently by everyone. Check out EtherPad for a demo of the techonology.
For me, in terms of Enterprise style uses for a wiki, I have a couple of thoughts;
An effective way to keep and synchronise a central, web based wiki with multiple, offline, desktop style wiki's for people on the go
To move towards wiki as a function as opposed to wiki as a system, so we can integrate the wiki collaborative system into other things
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I am about to start a new project and would like to document its development in a very simple blog.
My requirements are:
self-hosted on my Gentoo-based LAMP stack (that seems to rule out blogger)
Integration in a django based website (as in www.myproject.com/about, www.myproject.com/blog etc rather than www.myproject.com and a totally different site at blog.myproject.com)
very little or no learning curve that's specific to the blog engine (don't want to learn an API just to blog, but having to get deeper into Django to be able to roll my own would be OK) According to the answers so far, there is a chance that this excludes Wordpress
Should I
a) install blog engine X (please specify X)
b) use django to hand-roll a way to post new entries and a page on my website to display the posts in descending chronological order
Install Wordpress. It is the most common engine for a reason. It's PHP but will play just fine in your environment.
If you're the perfectionist kind, roll your own.
It isn't that hard
You learn something useful
You'll get exactly what you want and need
Be warned that you may run into a quagmire fighting comment spam, fixing security holes, etc. But it'll probably be a fun project.
If you are the practical type and ready to face some integration pain, use an existing engine like WadcomBlog (Python) or PyBlosxom, or something completely different like MovableType or WordPress.
Here's a simple Django blog example to get you started.
Some pros and cons of rolling your blog engine this article by Phil Haack.
Jeff Croft apparently rolled his own as well.
I've tried WordPress recently and am very disappointed. As long as you don't want to customize anything, all is well. But imagine you want to install a plugin to handle Markdown editing. There the trouble begins. The plugin architecture of WordPress is seriously screwd up. In the case of Markdown, this means that no good solution exists. The existing plugin is a series of (quite well-documented) hacks that fall apart at a hard stare.
I never intended to write the least bit of code for WordPress but the last few days, I've been knee-deep in PHP the whole time, hacking plugins as well as the WordPress core in order to make it work for my special scenario (which really isn't all that special, I'm just a perfectionist). Which is a pity, because the documentation of WordPress is more than just patchy. I don't use it anymore, I grep for functions and read the source. All in all, one of the less enjoyable OpenSource projects.
You can spend hours if not days customizing Wordpress with plugins, themes, etc...
I would go with a 0 installation solution, such as blogger (https://www.blogger.com/start)
You can even use our own domain name with it if you need do.
EDIT: Plus, if you ever get slashdotted, digged or redditted, google can handle the traffic, your server probably can't.
For me, Wordpress is still the quickest & simplest to setup and get going. It can be extended to do pretty much anything or you can keep it real simple. Runs on PHP, but unless you want to write plugins for it, you never need to write code
Have a look at Blosxom. It's file-based, so no crufty database. The basic idea has been ported to different languages, pyblosxom is in Python.
I use PyBlosxom for my personal blog, and I think it is pretty useful if you need something minimalistic. The deployment is simple, as you need only the python runtime and cgi. You might want to have some basic knowledge of python at least if you are going to use it, though.
Have a look at Blosxom. It's file-based, so no crufty database. The basic idea has been ported to different languages, pyblosxom is in Python.
I wrote the engine for my personal blog in maybe 6 hours during one weekend, with comments, labels, simplified markup, sitemap, feeds and so on. It was great fun and I learned a lot of Django.
If you decide to go this way, look at generic views, this Django feature will save you much of work (and learn few useful tricks).
I Haven't tried it myself yet (other than the demo), but I've bookmarked Chyrp so that if I ever need to set up a quick & simple blog (kind of like you're describing) I could try this. So check it out, might be a good option for you.