SRL Archive - General

Figured here was as good a place to ask as any. I'm just about to graduate from my college course in computer programming (it was *not* a degree; nothing heavily theoretical, just a 2 year course for a certificate) and was looking to create a website that showed off some of my skills, in the hope this would make me a more attractive hire. We focused fairly heavily on Java as an object oriented programming language, and got a little bit into Java EE. We also had a class on HTML/CSS/JavaScript, but it wasn't in depth and I don't have a strong understanding of the languages.

As for my idea, it was basically to make a website that replaced the current "Portables" friend's chat in RS3, allowing hosts to advertise their portables and users to find them easily. I could do user accounts, databases, all the typical stuff that comes with programming languages and so on.

We got far enough into Java EE that, with a little bit of brushing up, I feel fairly confident I could use it to create a web page that showed off the skills I currently have. That said, I also feel like it would be possible for me to, relatively easily, learn HTML/CSS/JavaScript with another language on the backend (I already know Python? And is that how it works? Not sure how the connection from HTML <> another language is done outside of Java EE, or whether JavaScript does that).

My question, then, is whether it would be beneficial for me - someone who has no real preference which way he goes in terms of languages and so on - to learn those new languages to do what I want to do, or brush up on Java EE and do it that way?

Thanks for your time, and sorry for the wall :P.

Even if you don't end up using it, if you want to be a web-dev it's definitely important to know/be familiar with the front end languages (html/css/js, especially the last two; html is pretty basic anyway). For the backend stuff you can use pretty much any language: python, java, c, whatever. I'd just do a google search for examples on how to hook them together (python would probably be the easiest and would have the most examples). Anyway, you'll probably find that the language you write in doesn't really matter that much, it's relatively easy to pick up a new language as most of them have the same core constructs (even C, but don't do it in C; C is pretty gnarly)

I don't care much what I work on, that's the thing. I just figured a web page would be the easiest way to display some of my knowledge.

And yeah, I'm not worried about picking up a new language. Just not sure what would be best to start with.

All of the below information is based off the CS industry in the UK:

What sort of company do you want to work for? If you're looking at larger businesses, they're more likely to use older languages (this doesn't change much for websites, the usual JS/HTML/CSS/PHP combo [could be ASP in some areas]). They're also very big on testing frameworks (so if you're applying for something in java, familiarise yourself with JUnit). SMEs are much more likely to use "trendy" languages, so if you have experience with things like RoR, node.js or any popular JS frameworks, then you'll be very popular.

One big thing is to show an understanding of different development paradigms. Something that is considered pretty popular at the moment is the scrum architecture (flexible agile programming essentially). Always show an experience of testing, testing is everything (but we nearly always are lazy with it).