Thursday, November 1, 2012

All these new fancy web pages..


As a Java developer with long time experience I always found touching web pages a tiresome task. Messing up with all the HTML and JavaScript code, digging into CSS to make JSP render as expected was not an obvious thing. Still it is not. This is mainly because I never had enough time to understand CSS and JavaScript and I admit it was never priority number 1 knowing each web browser have its own specificity  I just thought it' snot worth of trying. Better concentrate at Java word where most of the things is standardized and behaves as expected.

This was until I started to work closely with SmartClient and Grails.
Working closer with SmartClient library opened my eyes how much JavaScript evolved over the last years, how rapidly it develops and how amazing possibility it gives in comparison to what I met in legacy software in which it was just a little addition to all HTML rendered on server side. Now JavaScript is the place where all moves, flickers and rocks while server side is doing some business calculations not caring at all about front-end. It just takes data and returns data in desired format like JSON for instance.

Seeing a great potential in JavaScript I decided to learn more about it. By change there was a training organized in Poznan, Poland titled 'JavaScritp for Java Developers'. Wow, I thought  this is exactly what I need, so I subscribed and I was not mistaken. The 2-days training gave me a feel of how to write modern JavaScript pages using technologies like BackboneJs, RequireJs, UnderscodeJs. I even learned there are unit tests written for it using libraries analogical to JUnit in Java word. It looks all this new JavaScript is not that far from ideas I know from Java world.

Still not sure if this is me who found JavaScript or JavaScipt found me, but today I came into another blog post that gave me a kick to learn more in this field.
Article written in Polish can be found at http://mamstartup.pl/felietony/2882/jak-buduje-sie-strony-internetowe-w-2012-roku and author's blog is here, also quite interesting.
The author is pointing out many interesting tools used in modern web development.
I hope to give them a try so I set up a project on github where I plan to gather some demo code of my trials with it. For now there are some web scaling example with CSS available.

I also found good designer's resources at http://www.smashingmagazine.com/
Some free e-books can be downloaded from here but I've downloaded the pdf and copied it to my github.