(March 26, 2015 at 12:16 pm)AFTT47 Wrote: I have both programming and HTML/CSS experience. I would call myself an intermediate-level programmer using VB.NET and C#. I've done several websites using HTML/CSS with a smattering of active content using PHP but nothing fancy such as data-driven websites.
I'm looking at moving from desktop to browser-based programming but I'm not sure what route to take. I want to be able to build powerful, client-side applications that are platform-independent but I don't have a good feel for what the limitations are. Is it worth it to learn Java script or should I go straight into something more powerful like PHP?
I'm looking at code editors/IDEs too. Webstorm looks pretty nice but I wish you could add languages to it rather than have to get a whole new IDE for using PHP.
I should add that I'm a hobby programmer, not professional.
Javascript and PHP are really two entirely different things. Javascript runs in the browser, PHP runs on the server, and they serve different needs. PHP does all the back end stuff and outputs the HTML, Javascript runs on the client side and allows you to do UI things you can't do with straight HTML/CSS, and gives you the capability of doing AJAX stuff.
Javascript sucks, but it's practically a requirement for web development (that, or one of it's alternatives).
I do Java-SE/EE / JSP professionally, but that may be overkill for a hobby programmer (development environment is IntelliJ + Maven w/Spring framework and Hibernate , deployed on Tomcat application server with a database backend (Oracle, MySQL, or damn near anything else). Big learning curve, though, and overkill unless you're looking to do some very scalable projects.
I'm not personally a big fan of PHP, but it certainly does work for it's intended purpose. I couldn't comment on IDE's for it though.
