Many Firsts

I've created this blog that, from hereon forward, will document my future so-called accomplishments and evident failures on the road to them.

First Real Web Application

My first real web application is Eliza. She's one of the first natural language processors. Tell her your troubles and she will try to respond like a Rogerian psychotherapist. This is her Wikipedia entry: ELIZA.

I Learned Many Things

I've long labored to create my first real web app. I am an enterprise C++ and Java developer by profession and although I have tried servlets before, it's not quite what I wanted to do this time around. It's been a long journey reading and learning about HTML,CSS, Javascript and the whole server-side development. I've learned many things and discarded many things as well.

Things I've learned (and some discarded) in order:

1. HTML, CSS, Javascript - Javascript is probably the weirdest behaving language I have ever learned but I kept knowledge of most of these.
2. Ruby - dropped for the next item
3. Python: A wonderful language but sadly, not one I ended up using. Eventually dropped.
1. Google App Engine
2. Web2Py - can be used with GAE but turned out to be too complicated for my needs.
3. CherryPy - can be used with GAE but turned out to be too simple.
1. I eventually found out that GAE's mechanism for channels is too complicated to wrap my head around. Specially for a beginner web developer. So I dropped both Python and Google App Engine for something else entirely.
4. Bootstrap - I don't have to worry too much about CSS anymore! I can just code and it will look nice! Thank you to Twitter for this one.
5. Opa - Looked interesting but the seemingly complete documentation gives rise to documentation like these.
6. Meteor - This to me is the BEST out there. Sure. It's Javascript on the front as well as the back-end but that means, I have to worry less about language and just think about what it is I'm trying to accomplish. Bootstrap is a built-in plugin which means I can still use it and I did. 

First Repository

Now that everything has been done and mostly finished, I have uploaded the code to Github. Github is a server for Git much like the old Sourceforge was for CVS.  If you read the code carefully, you will see that it does something very different from what it's advertised to do. :D