Words You Can Use: The BAVC BLOG

Louis Juska, Lead Project DeveloperAre you interested in web development? By that, I don’t mean designing websites, nor even becoming an astounding scripter of the DOM–although there’s fertile territory there too. I mean squeezing network technologies to make them smaller, making applications on the web that run as if they were on your local machine. At minimum, two things are necessary if that’s where you want to go: a fat pipe and web applications that take advantage of it.

Broadband is getting cheaper and more people are getting access to it, but like all market-driven economies, distribution is uneven. It will eventually reach everyone like previous technologies had (look to people like those participating in Meraki’s Free The Net for that. It’s a matter of time before like initiatives spread.).

The second piece includes applications that bring people closer to resources they want, e.g. people through social networking sites, information via online encyclopedias, new employment opportunities through online head-hunting services, and of course, selling stuff.

Those applications need to be responsive, well designed, simple to use, stable and reliable, and to require zero to minimal training (close readers will notice that UI is web design–point taken, but I’m talking about the whole enchilada). This is the half I’m talking about when i mean web development. and one of the best tools to use to get up and running in this field might appear hyped to the gills, but it isn’t unjustified. it’s Rails. Each week I’m going to try to bring up something interesting either about ruby on rails or any other free or open-source web development tool I think readers might be interested in. There’s more to do and know now in the web development world than there was before–and it helps when we all spread our knowledge.

Next week I’ll talk a little about the programming language (some insist that it’s ‘just a scripting’ language–I’ll talk about that too) rails is written in. Have a great week.