Before you build, you must choose tools

So I am going to build a web site that is actually more of a web app, or web 2.0. In the beginning the web (and I mean HTML and web browsers, not gopher and finger) was a way of delivering documents. People got really clever in how they would make the documents look and interact with other documents, but the web pages were just pages. Then people started getting more clever and figured out ways to make the documents change and then just parts of a document to change and then pretty soon you have web 2.0. Now developing a web site is more about building a site or an app rather than defining pages that will be served up.

Web pages were always easy write. It just required any text editor. There was no compiling of code or accessing libraries. But then as web 2.0 started to emerge libraries appeared and tools became more complex. Web apps can still be written in a simple text editor. The tools and libraries were supposed to help make development easier and faster and more robust. I have never liked not knowing what code was doing. Even the most simple libraries bothered me, but unless I was going to write a whole operating system in assembly language I had to decide what I could live with and what I could live without.

The first tool choice must be the editor. The simplest text editor would be TextEdit on the Mac. Oh BTW I am on a Mac. I have regretted the move ever since I made it 6 months ago, but I am resigned to my choice. I have a PC that I use at work and so I guess having both is a tolerable consolation to having to put up with my dog of a machine. Now one thing that TextEdit does not do is tell me when I have typed something incorrectly. There are 100's if not 1,000's of different editors out there. I am assuming that every time that some one finds that and editor is missing one feature they go out and write their own. So my next goal is to find the editor that I want to use. Here is a problem. I will want to do a little editing at work (for work of course) so I will have to consider that I may have to use WordPad at work on the same files. That is it for now. Maybe tomorrow I will have some words to say about editors