On Fri, Feb 4, 2011 at 5:15 PM, Jim Green <student.northwest...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hello, > I wrote simple cgi scripts before but want to go further, I want to > learn a little bit systematic web programming, I found catalyst and > ORMs, do you guys think with those I don't need to learn javascript, > ajax etc?
Disclaimer: I'm not really familiar with Catalyst, so I'm not aware of it generating JavaScript. Learning JavaScript is pretty useful if you're doing Web programming. It's actually a pretty powerful language once you learn to use it. Especially with so much being done on the Web these days and the fact that it's basically available for you to extend all of that Web software from your browser. That said, you don't strictly need to learn JavaScript to to Web programming. As a matter of fact, you should generally try to make sure that your Web site works with no JavaScript at all. Not all users permit it to run. I myself use Firefox's NoScript extension and only allow sites that I trust to execute JavaScript. If I don't particularly trust your Web site and it isn't working without JavaScript then I usually 'd' (i.e., close the tab) immediately and never look back. Far too many Web sites these days are developed with a major dependence on JavaScript and it's in poor taste. JavaScript is a great tool for improving the user experience when it's available, but it shouldn't be necessary to use a site. Occasionally I find myself browsing the Web from a text-based browser like links with no graphical capabilities, let alone JavaScript support. With cleanly designed, semantical HTML, and proper use of CSS, you can get a very attractive looking Web site that works very well and is greatly accessible to the vast majority of users. If you are going to learn JavaScript, I recommend learning the jQuery library. It is basically a very powerful abstraction over the DOM and JavaScript APIs. In addition to doing a lot with little code, jQuery also provides cross-browser compatibility so you can worry a lot less about using silly, dated browser checking code and just focus on functionality. There is also a user-interface extension library that is based on jQuery, called jQuery UI. If offers a lot of very pretty and functional JavaScript-based UI widgets and effects. It can help you to improve the user experience that much more easily. Though again, you should try to make sure the Web site still works nicely even if the user doesn't permit it to execute. If you're really against JavaScript for some reason, the Google Web Toolkit provides one alternative: you can write a lot of the client-side code in Java instead, and GWT will compile it down (up? left?) to JavaScript for you. You can continue to use Perl server-side too, limiting GWT to client-side only if you like. -- Brandon McCaig <http://www.bamccaig.com/> <bamcc...@gmail.com> V zrna gur orfg jvgu jung V fnl. Vg qbrfa'g nyjnlf fbhaq gung jnl. Castopulence Software <http://www.castopulence.org/> <bamcc...@castopulence.org> -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: beginners-unsubscr...@perl.org For additional commands, e-mail: beginners-h...@perl.org http://learn.perl.org/
