Well apparently the new world of computing is coming in the form of web applications. This is where you can carry out your everyday computing tasks using the Internet and a web browser such as Internet Explorer (IE for short). For instance if you already use Gmail as your method of handing email you will already know that it is all handled through a web browser and the data is stored on Google’s servers. What else do use your computer for? Often the answer is word processing, a few spreadsheets, maybe a photo editing suite and for some, computer games. Currently many of these applications need software to be installed and run on your pc and the pc needs to be powerful enough to do the task. With web applications, all of these things will be accomplished through a web browser. One advantage of this is that you will probably always be using the latest version of the program as the developer only has to keep the one version on the web server up to date. Companies may have worries about sensitive data being stored on Internet servers but it looks as if they will be able to keep their data on their server while the actual program that uses the data is still on the Internet.
I want to be part of this new world and as I have some programming experience, this is what I am doing :-
I have downloaded Microsoft’s Visual Studio for C# 2005 Express version. This is free and with it you can learn the use of the C Sharp programming language, develop and debug applications. Visual Studio is a very powerful integrated development environment providing tutorials, example code, help, compiling and debugging facilities. I think it is only if you want to start selling your applications that you would need to purchase a ‘full’ version of Visual Studio.
I have downloaded a free Windows/web graph library.
I am purchasing a book on C#.
I am interested in Formula One motor racing and have decided to produce a web application that will produce F1 results in a graphical form. I will try to make it interesting and easy to use and the F1 data will be kept up to date using data stored in XML format on a web site. The project will take a couple of months before there is anything to look at, but in the meantime I have purchased a couple of domain names. They are www.f1graphs.com and www.f1graphs.co.uk and they are ‘parked’ for the moment so you can still view them. Once I have been through the steep learning curve of using C#, SQL, XML, ASP, .NET etc. then the page content will change to my new application.
So by spending very little money but maybe a lot of time, I hope to get in at the front end of this new world. The good news is all Internet users should benefit from this new technology as it becomes more widespread and mature.
Peewit
