PSA: For Web Devs, Programmers etc. Udemy courses all at £10

m_c

The frontend has to handle all the data entry/editing/display. At the moment I enter data on certain pages, then use other pages to look at the data and see if it's OK, and link times. Errant data entries then have to be tracked down manually.

I've got a general workflow in my mind, that once you enter a competitor number and time, then key information relating to the competitor is loaded on the screen, along with all the relevant times. This way incorrect details should get picked up at that point.

I'd also like various charts shown on the page, giving an event overview. I could cludge that via IFrames and JS, but I'd like a more dynamic appearance. I.e. say I have top 20 shown, I'd like a new entrant to the top 20 to slot in with a bit basic animation, instead of the page simply refreshing with the new top 20.

And on the subject of results screens, I'd like something that could gracefully handle connection loss (a bit like how Gmail does), and can pick up without the need to manually refresh the screen.

My problem is it's been that long since I paid any kind of real attention to web development (I think Rails had just appeared to give you an idea when that was!), I'm currently facing choice paralysis as to what to use. I've looked at options quite a few times, but I just end up with information overload, and going back to what I have.

My current thinking is try Angular, as at least it'll give me some kind of insight into SPA, and if needed move to something else. However I still keep thinking that going back to the basics of PHP, JS/JQuery, and AJAX might be simpler.

digitalscream

m_c said:

My current thinking is try Angular, as at least it'll give me some kind of insight into SPA, and if needed move to something else. However I still keep thinking that going back to the basics of PHP, JS/JQuery, and AJAX might be simpler.

This is part of what I'm saying - what does the SPA get its data from? You *still* have to have PHP/Rails/.NET/etc on the server side to serve the data to the SPA.

As for data visualisation...check this out:

https://d3js.org/

You can use that whether you have a traditional web app or SPA.

monquixote

As @digitalscream says d3 is a really good bet for charts or if you need something simpler then you can try google charts which has most of the basic stuff. You could also look at chart JS .

There is no real need to move to an SPA unless you just want to learn something new. It will probably just slow your development down quite a bit, but any of Vue, React and Angular 2 (the 2 part is important). 

You are still going to need a backend though. If you want to get heavily into Javascript then you could do the backend APIs in NodeJS with something like Express. That said as inelegant as PHP is it will get the job done and it's probably the quickest route to a working solution if that's what you are used to. If you aren't already combine it with some kind of Rails like framework and away you go.

If you want to be really fancy you could look at Phoenix/Elixir which is designed by one of the guys that made Rails to be the next generation of Rails like frameworks. Haven't had too much time to look at it yet, but it seems very cool indeed.

m_c

Thanks guys, you've certainly helped clear things up in my mind.

I'll stick with PHP for the backend for now, as it shouldn't take much effort to change the existing code to get an API that can generate the required data. I'll work through the Angular 2 course, and see if it'll do what I'd like before making any final decision.

ThePrettyDamned

Starting my web dev course tomorrow. Really excited

monquixote

ThePrettyDamned said:

Starting my web dev course tomorrow. Really excited

Nice one

Feel free to shout if you get stuck.

equalsql

Microsoft SQL Server 2016 now supports JSON. You can squirt the result from a stored procedure straight out to a browser via a lightweight middle layer. It's brilliant and no matter how complex the result set, i.e. deep hierarchical stuff, the json is always perfect and when using ajax, drops straight into the browser as a fully realised object that you can manipulate with JavaScript. My colleague and I had a lot of fun with it last year.

monquixote

equalsql said:

Microsoft SQL Server 2016 now supports JSON. You can squirt the result from a stored procedure straight out to a browser via a lightweight middle layer. It's brilliant and no matter how complex the result set, i.e. deep hierarchical stuff, the json is always perfect and when using ajax, drops straight into the browser as a fully realised object that you can manipulate with JavaScript. My colleague and I had a lot of fun with it last year.

It seems most of the DB vendors are responding to MongoDB with JSON data types. 

You can do similar things with Postgres and MySQL now. 

ThePrettyDamned

monquixote said:

ThePrettyDamned said:

Starting my web dev course tomorrow. Really excited

Nice one

Feel free to shout if you get stuck.

Aww thanks man, will do. It's the web development bootcamp, very well reviewed so I'm hoping it gives a decent overview of all the above - I'll finally understand what you guys are talking about

I started getting more interested when making my website. I used squarespace which was really easy to use and mobile responsive, fast loading etc but every template had limitations that drove me a bit nuts (perfect home screen but no thumbnails for blog posts?! Or a lovely blog and page format but poor gallery). I figured if i can create my own in a year's time it'll save me forking out another subscription and I'll get the website I really wanted.

PolarityMan

Anyone found anything good looking, I had a browse but not sure that most of them i couldn't just pickup from the products doc. 

oaf

Seems they're all $10 bought from a US IP address. A touch cheaper still...

equalsql

PolarityMan said:

Anyone found anything good looking, I had a browse but not sure that most of them i couldn't just pickup from the products doc. 

JavaScript: Understanding the Wierd Parts, is very good. It takes a completely different approach to teaching the constructs and looks exactly at what's happening behind the scenes with the JavaScript engine as it processes your code. I've owned a fair number of books on the language over the years and have never seen it presented in such a way before. I think the course is excellent. Having experienced the pain of getting weird results in Boolean conditions and getting 'undefined' var values, the section on coercion is enlightening for old programmers like me who are used to strictly (data) typed languages like C and Pascal.

PolarityMan

equalsql said:

PolarityMan said:

Anyone found anything good looking, I had a browse but not sure that most of them i couldn't just pickup from the products doc. 

JavaScript: Understanding the Wierd Parts, is very good. It takes a completely different approach to teaching the constructs and looks exactly at what's happening behind the scenes with the JavaScript engine as it processes your code. I've owned a fair number of books on the language over the years and have never seen it presented in such a way before. I think the course is excellent. Having experienced the pain of getting weird results in Boolean conditions and getting 'undefined' var values, the section on coercion is enlightening for old programmers like me who are used to strictly (data) typed languages like C and Pascal.

Which JS engine? We've been bolting bits of V8 into our code recently so if it goes into that level of detail it might be interesting,

equalsql

The author is using Chrome so I'm presuming V8 is the engine. 

shrinkwrap

So.. Mon Quxote and Digitalscream, or anyone else for that matter, can I ask what I should learn?
I'm a self employed web developer - loads of hand coded PHP/MySql / my own 'strictly procedural' CMS /plenty of throwing JQuery/JS/Ajax around. A few sites where the admin side is the business, so not yer average catalogue site. Design skills, manager skills, some good names on the CV, but I've been out of the market for years.
I need more work, there's not enough coming through.
I'm old - can't write OO to save my life - would love to pick up a new skill that I can freelance with.
I can't abandon my current clients either, but I only get around 6-7 months work a year from it.
Plumbing? I'm not bad at that either.
Seriously, any suggestions would be much appreciated.


edit: not heard of Vue before - looks interesting - I'm so old school, one page apps remind me of developing with Macromedia Director - we've only just got past what that could do 20 years ago!!

monquixote

You don't need to learn anything else if you don't want to there are still plenty of jobs around slinging PHP.
A huge percentage of the sites out there are just skinned up wordpress or drupal etc. 

One thing that might be worth a look is something like: http://youmightnotneedjquery.com/
Which shows you some of the things you can do in modern browsers that you used to need JQuery for. Handy if you are doing something basic and don't want to pull in a library. It's worth learning some Javascript ES6 features as it makes the language much nicer to use.

If you are principally doing static or basic DB driven sites there is really no need to learn Angular or React unless you really want to as a skinned up CMS is a much better fit for those types of applications.

digitalscream

shrinkwrap said:

I'm old - can't write OO to save my life - would love to pick up a new skill that I can freelance with.

To be honest, picking up basic OO is probably going to be your best bet. It's not as hard as it seems, but even most PHP apps have moved away from the procedural approach these days.

If you want to have lots of jobs open to you, ASP.NET and C# is the way forward; all these years later, Microsoft still have a monopoly on the programming market.

If you want to do something interesting, Ruby on Rails is a really easy way into OO programming because it's baked into the whole thing and forces you down that road without you even thinking about it (in fact, it does a lot of the OO stuff for you). Otherwise, Node.js might be a good thing to try if you're already familiar with Javascript.

mellowsun

Just signed up for the deep reinforcement learning course - looking forward to it!

Nabokovs_Monkey

I've used Udemy in the past for web dev stuff. I found the main thing to look out for was any outrageous accents. Theres a certain threshold beyond which it inhibits my learning so while the content may have been good I excluded due to accent.

shrinkwrap

Thanks very much for the ideas digitalscream and monquixote - much appreciated - got me researching and thinking it all through... I've discovered I'm called an (out of date) fullstack developer.
Not sure about RoR, I looked into it a bit 10 years ago. But for now Node, probably followed by Vue.

edit: Started 'Vue2- The complete guide' very good, surprised how professional it is (price dropped to a tenner too)