Az Caz & Co

In my time as a web developer I have seen web technologies move in all sorts of directions and have seen many conflicts of interest as to where things should be going and how things are done. What this has always done and will continue to do is throw up the questions like what should I be learning? Am I doing things the right way? Which technology is the best for me to learn?

To be honest I do not have the answers to all of these questions as I myself am currently being pulled in a wealth of different directions and trying to keep abreast of what is going on. The web is evolving on a daily basis and is hard to keep up with so I continue to do my best at keeping on top of current developments and trends so I can assess what I might need to learn next or even in the future.

The most important tool that I have found for information mining is RSS which I use to get all the latest news / information from a very wide base of sites without having to visit them. This has been great but before you know it (if you’re like me) you find yourself cruising a vast amount of sites and subscribing to their feeds and before you know it you have run into the scenario where you need to manage your feeds more efficiently. I have just found a site (which is now my homepage) called NetVibes which is a customizable portal with a rather slick AJAX interface. Up until recently I have been using the Sage plugin for Firefox for managing my feeds but using Net Vibes I can actually pull all of my feeds into one place and get a broad overview of where there is new information as opposed to going through one source at a time. Oh yeah… I forgot to mention that if you sign up for it (free) then you can access your portal from any computer so long as it is hooked up to the net. Pretty cool feature if you ask me so well worth checking out.

Okay, so I have explained how I try to keep on top of information but what information am I trying to keep track of? Well the simple answer to that one would be lots but I am going to ellaborate a little so stay with me for a little longer.

When I attended @media 2005 earlier in the year I had my eyes opened to another tool that I had at my disposal that I have never embraced with open arms and that tool was Javascript. Now I know what you are about to say… How can you have been a web developer for years and not use Javascript? Well simple, every web developer has been guilty of butchering other peoples scripts and yes, I have used Javascript, but I have never embraced it as a tool as I am sure many other developers haven’t. I had my eyes opened as to how I could use it properly in an unobtrusive way so that it would degrade gracefully and how I could add another layer to what I do by making use of it. The beauty being that if you are already savvy with building tabless sites using CSS then you are already 75% of the way (if not more) to being able to write DOM scripts as you are already up to speed with targeting elements in your documents, you just have to learn a little more syntax I have had a whole new world of possibilities open up to me on how I can enhance user experience through use of unbtrusive javascript and I can’t wait to explore it further.

From a front end development perspective, Javascript is the gateway to being able to do loads of cool stuff however there are some other technologies that I have been playing with that make alot of sense. I have been interested in finding practical uses for XML within a web development environment so have done some experimentation with XSL and XSLT. I can definitely see where the benefits lie with XML but without a backend supporting front end transformations you are fairly limited with what you can do.

Where it does get interesting is where you begin to send information between server and browser in the form of XML as it opens up a lot of doors. For example feeding XML into flash or making server requests on the fly using the XMLhttpRequest from Javascript in an AJAX application. I just saw one of the most exciting and inspiring videos I have seen in a long time from a Web 2.0 conference where Kevin Lynch demonstrates MeasureMap. In the video he shows how Flash and (X)HTML are talking to (and updating) each other on the same page which I found truely mind blowing as I had never seen it done before.

The web is maturing at a scary rate, and while this is a good thing there is always going to be something new to learn and another technology to pick up. I can remember a few years ago when there were just a few really good resources out there such as webmonkey where I would imagine alot of people learned the basics, but now there are just so many topics into which you could try and specialise.

I for one will be continuing down the DOM Scripting route and learning how to work well with web services so that I can embrace future developments within the near future but ultimately there is too much to follow and it’s hard to suss out exactly what will be the next definite thing. I am going to continue to watching what is going on and hopefully do my bit towards advocating the use of Web Standards & modern development techniques as well as using them myself to do what I do.

Hopefully I will figure it all out and come out on top but just like the tile of this article says… There are so many directions… which way do you go?

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