AppJet Offers Browser-Based Coding How-To, Hosting
theodp writes "Know someone who wants to learn to program? Paul Graham advises programmer wannabes to check out The Absolute Beginner's Guide to Programming on the Web from AppJet, which aims to be 'the funnest and easiest way for a beginner to get started programming.' Setting the guide apart from other tutorials is the ability to edit and run any of the all-Javascript examples directly in your browser. Newcomers to programming and experienced developers alike can also publish their AppJet creations on the web. Sure beats GE BASIC on the General Electric Time-Sharing Service!"
When they say "funnest" I assume they mean "most fun," correct? I'm not a programmer but from what I understand, proper syntax can be important. When the site designers have gotten a better grasp of the English language, I'll trust their programming advice.
Been using AppJet for a while (I was among the earliest members) and I'm really glad to see them featured. AppJet's founders have done a wonderful job creating an easy to use and powerful language. They consistently communicate with their community (they offer personalized help in the forums), and have been creating new features and aspects of AppJet right from the beginning. However, be warned: AppJet really is a beta, and there are occasionally bugs. They're rectified very quickly however. I highly recommend AppJet.
From the intoduction page: "JavaScript is the most prevalent programming language in the world". Something tells me this ain't true... Aren't we getting a little carried away with Javascript?
Setting the guide apart from other tutorials is the ability to edit and run any of the all-Javascript examples directly in your browser.
Am I reading this correctly or does this book actually include example code?! How revolutionary!
Whale
http://www.w3schools.com/ - I use this site to get undergrads up to speed with the programming we do in our shop at the university. It's always worked well, and all the code is runnable in the browser. Pretty good info, too.
ah.clem
"Life is not magic." Dr. Ron Weiss - "If we don't play God, who will?" Dr. James Watson
So by the third page, they already have you stealing bandwidth by deep-linking images?
Cool site, but I really hope they have a section on netiquette somewhere in there...
Sounds tricky. I wonder how do dey do dat?
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
USQ has been using in-browser editable JavaScript programs for engineering simulations since 1997. Some of the original ones can still be found at jollies.com. (Though some haven't kept up with modern browsers). The name jollies is one of those artificially contrived acronyms.
No, using a comma instead of "and" in a news title does NOT make it almost sound like serious journalism.
Sorry ;)
BoD
I used to HATE getting into JavaScript before I found JQuery. When I first got into it, I converted a web app that had pages of DOM manipulation code into a series of small chunks of JQuery code. A conservative estimate is that JQuery eliminated 60% of the hand-written DOM manipulation code and such.
As a contrast, my wife works with a woman who didn't get to use any library, and had to code everything using just the base JavaScript APIs. After several months, she had a bloated beast that barely did anything because she had to implement so many things herself, rather than just making a few calls to JQuery here, or Prototype there.
Just because he has his fist up McLame's ass doesn't make Cheney a poo fetishist.
Normally, it would make him a ventriloquist, but with this being politics.....
Holy Cow!!! I learned to program in GE BASIC on a General Electric Time-Sharing System, back in 1973. Holy Cow again!!!
http://eloquentjavascript.net/
I really liked this one.
Not going to look into this in too much depth yet, but it sounds quite a lot like Heroku -- only less beginner-oriented, and without trying to do server-side javascript.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
AppJet is pretty cool. It's a great way to write a little one-off web app. You don't have to worry about installing anything, getting hosting, etc etc. You just type some code into the browser-based IDE and you're done.
My sig in AppJet.
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
Y'all gotta realize at the time, your choices were COBOL, FORTRAN, JCL, etc. The history is: In 1964 or 1965, the GE manager, Arnold Spielberg (you might have seen his son's movies) came back from a conference where he had seen BASIC. He realized this was a radical thing - a programming language a "normal" engineer or .. (shudder) .. a manager could write a program in - interactively. To that point, *everything* was batch.
They first put it on a GE 250, and were the first folks to figure out the interactive job shop. Basically (all puns intended :^) they charged for resources - time, disc space, etc.
They hired the students from Univ Chicago who had experience with BASIC. They paid them as consultants, ie about $200/day - they could not get the students to leave - the students were sleeping under their desks!
This was the real start of command line shells and "real" interactive shells/languages.
(My father was on the team, and I knew many of the other team members. The team went on to create CALL360, another radical OS, and the first SpectraPhysics UPC scanner.)
http://oreillyschool.com has been doing this kind of thing for years.
Tetris in /* appjet:version 0.1 */
page.setMode("plain");print(html("""Z=X=[B=A=12];function Y(){for(C
=[q=c=i=4];f=i--*K;c-=!Z[h+(K+6?p+K:C[i]=p*A-(p/9|0)*145)])p=B[i];for(c?0:K+6?h
+=K:t?B=C:0;i=K=q--;f+=Z[A+p])k=X[p=h+B[q]]=1;h+=A;if(f|B)for(Z=X,X=[l=228],B=[
[-7,-20,6,h=17,-9,3,3][t=++t%7]-4,0,1,t-6?-A:2];l--;)for(l%A?l-=l%A*!Z[l]:(P+=
k++,c=l+=A);--c>A;)Z[c]=Z[c-A];for(S="";i228
)?i%A?"â-":"â-
":"ï¼");D.innerHTML=S+P;Z[5]||setTimeout(Y,i-P)}Y(h=K=t=P=0)
The language is JavaScript. AppJet's founders did not create it. They provide a hosting environment and some libraries.
You insensitive clod!
(Yes, really. It was 1969.)
Your god may be dead, but mine aren't!