Beginner looking for suggestion: building my first website with GAE, picking framework and looking for AJAX learning resources [closed]

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I have zero web programming experience but has been in IT industry for a while, mainly as a CRM technical consultant. I'm familiar with VBScript and Javascript, not in a Web context but as general scripting tools. I'm good at designing business processes, database models and using DB queries. I have some basic understanding of GAE and Python by doing the tutorials by Google. I used to write some tools with C# and VB6 a long time ago.

So I've decided to build my first website on Google AppEngine, and I'm lost in so many choices and new skills to learn.

What I'm planning to build is a simple website where users can post short messages and vote upon them. Which requires a simple but dynamic front page, login/cookie handling, Reddit like post voting/aging and some data storage.

Maybe the first question is which framework should I use? I heard Flask is good for beginner to learn web programming and webapp2 is easy to start since it's integrated to GAE by default. I've looked at Django as well, it looks very powerful, but I couldn't decide.

Since my idea is largely based on a concise but dynamic front page, I guess something AJAX is a must. But I have no clue on where to start. All those Ajax, Jquery, ProtoRPC are so confusing. Which technologies should I use and where can I find good tutorials?

I am also looking for suggestions on potential challenges and anything I should learn to achieve my goal. Thanks!

Answer 1

Since your project is inspired by reddit, the web development course with Steve Huffman (the technical founder of reddit) will be extremely helpful for you. https://www.udacity.com/course/cs253 - it's free if you just watch the courseware. He even explains their aging algorithms in the end.

This course covers the back-end side of building a python applicaiton with the default webapp2 framework on appengine. He doesn't cover the front-end besides the basics (HTML forms and tables, stuff like this).

Now, Jquery is a Javascript library which is used by about all of the dynamic websites. It is a convenient way to work with the DOM on the fly. Everything you can do with jQuery, you can do with plain javascript, it's just that jQuery is infinitely easier to work with. This library is used on the front-end, and it doesn't matter what backend you choose. It is extremely simple and powerful and you can learn the basics at the free codeschool course try.jquery.com. Basically, if you want something to happen on the page dynamically (the arrow becomes red once the user clicked on it), you use jQuery. AJAX is asynchronous communication with the server, it can be done by plain javascript but jQuery provides a very convenient wrapper for doing it. Usecase: the user clicked on the arrow, you painted it in red with jQuery, you incremented the votes counter (again with jQuery), and now you need to send the upvote to the server without reloading the page. For this you perform jQuery.ajax() call, and pass the user data as a param.

So to wrap it up: you need to write javascript to make a dynamic page and jQuery is the most common library that helps you with this. You need AJAX to get and post data to the server without page refreshes, this is implemented in jQuery. You can use jQuery with any back-end framework that you choose. Start with the simple jQuery tutorial, then read about $.ajax call and it will be clear for you.