My First dot com: Idea to Implementation pt2
In my last post I went through my thought processes for my first online business venture. Now I’m going to speak about my implementation process. I wont bore you with any in depth programming and technical details, but rather give you information on the tools I used to implement my website. I will also give you information on viable alternatives to what I used so you can weigh your options and choose wisely.
Web Development
My first dot com has a social networking theme to it. After doing research on similar sites I noted the basic services I should provide along with the back end needed to support such services. Being a software developer myself and a web enthusiast it wasn’t too hard for me to identify what was needed. A basic point of view for a web application, involves a front end and a back end. The front end is what the user sees and interacts with. This is the nice layout and information on your website, well presented to the user. The back end usually involves a database filled with the information you are presenting. We use a programming language or scripting language to communicate between our front end and back end as described in this post.
Programming Language of choice:
My programming language of choice was ruby using the ruby on rails framework. For those of you who may have never heard of ruby before, just check out those two links in the previous sentence for a nice introduction. Although I recommend ruby and ruby on rails for anyone, the persons just starting out would have a nice time with it. It has a much more gradual learning curve for easy and quick development. Additionally ruby and ruby on rails are..FREEEEE. Yes folks, ruby and ruby on rails are open source languages and frameworks respectively. Of course one can argue any language is free and available for use, but not all the tools available to aid in the development are free in most cases. 
The books shown above are what I used to develop my website/web application. Both books centre their information around social networking projects. Practical Rails goes more in depth and gives examples on how to make as many features available for you website. They are both excellent sources on information in my opinion and I strongly recommend interested persons taking a look at them.
Alternative Programming Language:
PHP is also a good programming language for web development. It is also open source and works well with mysql. For all my fellow bloggers you would realise wordpress is written in php, so this gives you an idea of the capabilities it has. PHP has a slightly steeper learning curve than ruby in my opinion, I would suggest this for persons with some experience in programming and scripting languages.To tell the truth I can’t write an ounce of php, I only know the little I’ve learnt from going through the theme files in wordpress. There is also a little rivalry in the open source community between ruby on rails and php to the extent there are rails vs php commercials on youtube.
I will be brief on two other alternatives. namely Microsoft Active Server Pages(ASP) and Adobe Coldfusion. Both are proprietary software used to develop web applications. They are good for persons who can not program at all, or are better designers than coders. They give you a drag and drop environment to develop your web applications and generate the code for you in the background.
Database of choice:
I’m sure you’ve guessed it by now but the database of choice was mysql. It is “the world’s most popular open source database” according to their website. It works very well and is quite scalable. It works well with PHP and Ruby on rails. ROR in particular makes it extremely easy to develop databases for our web application. I have to be extremely biased in this case so I have no alternative suggestions for mysql.
Design and Layout:
Cascaded Style Sheets, otherwise known as CSS, was my choice for website design layout. To be honest, I hardly did much of this on my own. I used a free css template. Their a number of them available online with different licence agreements, but free none the less. The problem with this is you run the risk of having a website that can possibly look exactly like someone else’s. However you can modify the template (once allowed to under the licence agreement) to give it your own personal look.
I hope you will find this post useful in some way. Thanks for reading.
I have reading up on the Zend FrameWork for php. Like Ruby it simplifies the development process for you.
I did some stuff using php, that is why I am giving this framework a shot before I look at Ruby.
But my work colleague, who I inspired to learn Ruby, is always talking about how easy it is.
March 17th, 2008 at 8:39 pm
I am always hearing my work colleague talk about not having adequate tutorials for Ruby on Rails 2.0 online.
Do you know of any good ones? Or maybe, sometime in the future you could do a few simple ones for us newbies :P.
March 17th, 2008 at 8:49 pm