Website Developer Pathway Part 4 - Javascript and jQuery

Posted by Colin Hall on Wednesday 18th of April 2012

This is a blog series of my early years as a web developer. The final part will take you through the years of Javascript and jQuery Development.

You may remember back in part 1 I told how I tried my hand at the dark arts of programming with Javascript. Back then I knew little about real programming, I was good with HTML and CSS but knew no other languages. I had built some very basic functionality with Javascript but anything more seemed like Chinese to me.

I later went on to learn ActionScript 2.0 and 3.0. I found this a lot easier to grasp than Javascript and from there I went on to PHP, from which I was building full-blown web systems. The only piece of the puzzle missing at this point was the client side interaction without using Flash. It was time to revisit my nemesis of a few years ago.

I started by researching Javascript and was surprised to read that Actionscript was a version of Javascript. My hopes of learning it went up a few notches. I worked on a few tutorials and quickly realised that because I had the core programming knowledge, gained by learning ActionSctipt and PHP, a lot of the core functionality was very similar. It was just a case of learning the different syntax for the language. The core functions actually work in the same way, so that's the if - else functions etc. Loops were not too hard to learn either.

Within a month or so I was able to add some nice Javascript and some client functionality to my site; such as form validation on the page.

Ajax

The next step was to look at AJAX. Again, it was a few tutorials and reading a few documents. My website gained some content delivery without refreshing the page.

What was a dark art suddenly became an extremely useful tool in the box. When you add interactive elements to your site, your websites become so much better. Now I'm not talking about drowning it in everything jumping around the page but just things that make your site more usable.

Frameworks

As you probably know from my previous posts, I am not a big fan of Frameworks or Libraries. I could see the benefits of them to an extent but couldn't understand why, as a developer, you wouldn't want to know what the scripts were doing. However jQuery totally changed my opinion of Frameworks/Libraries.

Now don't get me wrong, I still won't use one just for the sake of it. As I've said previously, I made my own PHP framework so that I can control the whole framework. I have also pre-built my own libraries to add to the framework functionality and to access third party API's. jQuery though is a great library.

The selection system for anyone who already knows CSS is a dream. Javascript is a little less intuitive. As with most frameworks and libraries, it also works very well when combining both Javscript and jQuery together, so knowing Javascript is still a big advantage.

jQuery is the reason why I have completely stopped creating anything for the web in Flash, it is so easy to create animations and image sliders etc. This will, in time, be completely replaced by doing things in HTML and CSS but, at the moment, the two technologies you should be learning, if you want to design and develop websites, are PHP and jQuery. I would also highly recommend learning Javascript.

Since learning my main toolset I have played with Ruby and Ruby on Rails, a little bit of Java but the ones that remain with me and what I keep going back to are PHP, Javascript and jQuery.

Now you will hear a lot of people saying that PHP is not a real programming language. If they say that to you, ask them what Facebook, Mailchimp, Wordpress, Drupal and Joomla are built on. If they say you should be learning Ruby on Rails, ask them why Twitter moved away from ROR to Java.

I have now also learned objective C to enable me to build Apps for Apple Devices. I also intend to learn a little more Java, however, the most important thing is to be confident in the tools you use.

Well folks, that draws a close to this series of posts.

I hope you have enjoyed reading and if you have any questions, please feel free to contact me.