Web Development

Here at LevelTen we have a few book clubs going on. Right now, one of the books we are reading is Agile Estimation and Planning. LevelTen is in the process of implementing an iterative development process which seems to make great sense for small to mid-level Web projects.

Web projects are strange beasts. There are out-of-the-box tools that provide a ton of value. Still small firms with small budgets often have need for custom development that is often prohibitively expensive. The tools to do great things cheaply and quickly just aren't there yet (but progress is being made rapidly).

Earlier this week, Stephanie put together a really cool design for our portfolio section on the LevelTenDesign.com Web site. It was based off of a jQuery snippet she found that emulates the Coda slider (http://www.panic.com/coda/).

If you create pages that are not part of the osCommerce engine then they will not carry over the unique session ID, thus dropping items from your shopping cart if you continue to browse.

As a Web designer, I like to approach the design of any site as efficiently as possible. Long before I even became interested in Web design, I stumbled upon the art of information architecture, which is basically a complex map of information. As a primarily visual learner, I took information architecture to the next level by expressing information visually as opposed to textually. My fascination with mapping led me to what I consider my primary source of inspiration: maps!

I've been developing in Drupal for a couple of years now. As LevelTen adopts Drupal, I'm seeing people have moments where something clicks and for a split second it seems like you are looking directly into the future of Web development.

That moment, for me, was in discovering the long-since-deprecated module Flexinode. Before Flexinode, all new content types in Drupal required a .module file that implemented a number of hooks and the creation of database tables and fields. This was something that really only a Web developer would do.

Java Servlet technology provides Web developers with a simple, consistent mechanism for extending the functionality of a Web server and for accessing existing business systems. A servlet can almost be thought of as an applet that runs on the server side--without a face. Java servlets make many Web applications possible.

Further Reading

http://java.sun.com/products/servlet/

Active Server Pages technology generates HTML and passes the dynamically created HTML to the browser to be displayed to the user. Microsoft created Active Server Pages to make it easier for developers to create dynamic Web sites in a Windows environment.

Further Reading

http://course.cengage.com/careers/glossary/programming.cfm#cgi

ColdFusion is a product created by Allaire Corporation of Cambridge, Mass. that includes a server and a development toolset designed to integrate databases and Web pages. With ColdFusion, a user could enter a zip code on a Web page, and the server would query a database for information on the nearest movie theaters and present the results in HTML form. ColdFusion Web pages include tags written in ColdFusion Markup Language (CFML) that simplify integration with databases and avoid the use of more complex languages like C++ to create translating programs.

A Common Gateway Interface Script (CGI Script) is a small program written in a language such as Perl, Tcl, C or C++, it functions as the glue between HTML pages and other programs on a web server.

For example, a CGI script would allow search data entered on a Web page to be sent to the DBMS (database management system) for lookup. It would also format the results of that search as an HTML page and send it back to the user. The CGI script resides in the server and obtains the data from the user via environment variables that the Web server makes available to it.

The End-User Needs Analysis defines the web site requirements and expectations from the customer or audience's perspective. The Internet is the ultimate open market and if you do not effectively meet users growing expectations of what a web site should offer they will find someone who can at the click of a button.