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Web development questions

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musicman

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jun 1, 2000
Messages
419
I just took a job at a junior college as a report writer for a new school info system (handles students, finance, etc.). Now they are wanting to bring in a SQL server and start doing some web developing.

An example of what is wanted is a web app that will handle Parking Services' stuff a lot better than their current way. Keep track of parking tickets and such. I can do web design (HTML, CSS, etc.) but web programming in beyond my realm. I know ASP is a needed option because we can get apps from other schools that are written in ASP.

My questions are what is the difference between ASP, ASP.Net, and AJAX? Should we consider all three, which would be better for what we are trying to do? I know Dreamweaver can create ASP stuff and it's the software I know how to use. Can we use it or should we consider something else?

Also, any training/book recommendations would be great.
 
Got to throw down the "I'm a n00b and take what I say with a grain of salt" disclaimer here, but since no one has replied yet:

I believe you're basically going to need Visual Studio .Net to do meaningful ASP (active server page) stuff. ASP and JSP (a competing Java version) are basically web applications that output HTML instead of text or graphics. My experience is with JSP's, but I believe in either case much of the heavy lifting is going to be done by a true blue programming language, such as Visual Basic or C# for ASP, or Java naturally for JSP.

You'll have to know a bit about the language you choose to write the APP, and you're also going to need to know some degree of SQL to handle the data storage/retrieval that's going to be needed for something like a parking ticket database. In a project like this, HTML is honestly something of an afterthought and the actual HTML code is only as complex as you want the page to look and feel. Think of it more as a middleman for gathering data parameters and displaying returned datasets in a situation like this.

AJAX could enhance your project a great deal, but isn't a competing technology to ASP or JSP. It's more of a programming paradigm actually. The acronym stands for "Asynchronious Javascript and XML". The highest form of AJAX I can think of currently are digg.com and gmail and google earth. AJAX is the technology that allows you to use Javascript and XML to update very small portions of data on the screen individually without reloading the entire page, such as expanding and collapsing comments on Digg and the ability to scroll around a goggle map without reloading the page everytime you move past the displayed map. Extremely cool stuff, and an important aspect of Web 2.0, but you may or may not need (or want) to use it. That's not to understate the power of moving XML around between a Javascript and a backend server though, that can be extremely useful but it won't do the heavy lifting for you here.

ASP I know very little about, but I'm reasonably familiar with JSP and the two technologies are fairly similar in concept if not in practice if I'm not mistaken.

The main thing here is the logic of your web page is going to be broken down into several major parts that are close to completely separate. In fact, you want them to be completely separate, so you can change a single aspect fairly easily without breaking anything. HTML is really just the user interface of a project like this, and the business logic is a completely separate animal.

Again, I'm just in my Junior year of a CS degree and have only been in the industry six months or so, but I did a bunch of JSP stuff a while back and that's essentially how you'll have to approach it. At minimum you'll have to be able to code in one of the .net languages reasonably well to use ASP, in addition to the web stuff. Hope that helps a little bit at least in overview sense.
 
musicman said:
I just took a job at a junior college as a report writer for a new school info system (handles students, finance, etc.). Now they are wanting to bring in a SQL server and start doing some web developing.

An example of what is wanted is a web app that will handle Parking Services' stuff a lot better than their current way. Keep track of parking tickets and such. I can do web design (HTML, CSS, etc.) but web programming in beyond my realm. I know ASP is a needed option because we can get apps from other schools that are written in ASP.

My questions are what is the difference between ASP, ASP.Net, and AJAX? Should we consider all three, which would be better for what we are trying to do? I know Dreamweaver can create ASP stuff and it's the software I know how to use. Can we use it or should we consider something else?

Also, any training/book recommendations would be great.
Click to expand...

Read this: http://www.w3schools.com/aspnet/aspnet_vsasp.asp

Then read this on ajax: http://www.w3schools.com/ajax/default.asp

You can prolly do everything you want with asp and ajax. Ajax is like the frosting on a cake.. Its not really needed, but usually adds that extra 'whatever' to your web development needs.

Dreamweaver has asp/asp .net support, but it wont code an app for you. Dreamweaver would be a great editor to code asp in as it has great syntax highlighting, but you should also know the language. DW has many great features like insert "THIS" options. IE, Insert an asp include, comment etc. plugins which may require you to purchase may have other options and further features "inserting" asp code into your page. Best thing would be to just know the language, or have a script you can edit to suite your needs.

If you want to learn asp, then go to this thread: http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1215720 where others are suggesting books to learn from.
 
Warning - if you write it, you will be forced to support it in addition to everything else you already do. If you write it, the person after you will be forced to support it - being that this is a Jr College, there's a very real chance that the next person in your position won't be able to do so. The school will then be required to hire some overpriced consultants to come in and fix things and/or migrate to a new system.

You (well... the school) might honestly be ahead of the game buying an off-the-shelf parking system unless they are serious about providing long-term support of new class of home-grown applications.
 
ameoba said:
Warning - if you write it, you will be forced to support it in addition to everything else you already do. If you write it, the person after you will be forced to support it - being that this is a Jr College, there's a very real chance that the next person in your position won't be able to do so. The school will then be required to hire some overpriced consultants to come in and fix things and/or migrate to a new system.

You (well... the school) might honestly be ahead of the game buying an off-the-shelf parking system unless they are serious about providing long-term support of new class of home-grown applications.
Click to expand...
A very good point. My school uses some system called Cardinal, which I would hazard to guess aids in getting me parking tickets as well...lol.

It's a good exercise though, and there are a lot of similar needs a school would have. Fundamentally a DB based parking system wouldn't be that different than any other sort of data retention and display system.
 
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