Oh, gawd, why
Over the last couple of weeks i’ve been playing with some new technology, not to any depth but just enough to get a feel for it. The week before last it was all Python & Django followed by AngularJS, well this week has been a bit more Javascript in the form of Node.js; granted I’ve not done much but I’ve done some.
As always it started in a random planning session where we have decided that we will make our own tool that will replace our current monitoring tools, the architecture was all drawn up, queue services, agents, plugins, a super fast “worker” process for handling the queue and a management console for pushing commands in and displaying results.
Because of my last two blog posts I got volunteered to do the front end, which is good as I will learn more AngularJS which I would like and I will learn more bootstrap which I would like, I also thought I’d get to write a nice backend in the language of my choice; turns out, not so much.
Would it be Ruby now I’m getting proficient with it? maybe Python, the rest is in Python, I could live with python, it’s not too dissimilar to ruby. It turns out it would be in node.js, oh gawd why. I’m not a fan of JavaScript, and here’s why; back in the day for my university final year project, back when AJAX had just come out and there were no libraries to do it I made a GeoBlog, using google maps API’s, JavaScript and PHP. It had over 1000 lines of javascript, there were no debuggers, the best you had was a console to point out syntax errors. Well that was a nightmare, at least now things have improved with proper debuggers in the browser etc etc so this time would be better…
Sort of…
To be honest node.js isn’t that bad to write simple things in, I’ve been getting more confused by having controllers and routes for both angular and node and trying to keep that separation in my head. I’ve so far been keeping good to my promise to do button first development so other than writing a simple api to return json I’ve not had to do much in node yet and only a little angular but at some point i’m going to get really stuck.
For some reason all these moving parts haven’t yet fallen into place and I’m wondering if I need to go back to some basics and re-vist javascript in it’s pure form and start building on that to get int node and angular. At the moment my coding is purely google, copy, paste, edit; not much in the way of understanding and if I’m going to make this thing work I need more of an understanding.
Maybe I should start with my old friend w3schools followed by some Code Academy followed by all of these
Busy week ahead I think, wonder if it will help or confuse me more, either way more updates next week I think :)
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