what are the biggest hurdles to overcome from being a desktop programmer to a web programmer?

Question

I've been an java programmer forever. Now I want to go web.

What mental leaps should I be expecting?

Answer 1

HTTP is stateless. Get used to it.

Answer 2

Not only is HTTP Stateless, UI Design is far more difficult.

Users aren't all on the same browser, and each browser has its own rendering quarks. Familiarize yourself with them and you'll get a leg up.

Answer 3

There are subtle yet excruciatingly painful differences in the way the major browsers handle edge cases in javascript and CSS.

Answer 4

One of the hurdles you'll have to overcome is the request/response stream of HTTP. It's not difficult, you just have to learn to take it into account.

Answer 5

It's a different paradigm.
You need to spend lots of time validating your input.
Don't ever trust your user.

HTTP is Stateless.

If you are going to do front-end web development then you need to make sure your interface works fine on all browsers.

Answer 6

If you're switching to PHP:

- PHP doesn't have and know anything about states. 
- PHP function arguments are not consistent. Some functions do it the same way and in the same order, others completely fuck up. This is getting better.
- The language is sometimes confusing. E.g. instanceof accepts a Class name or a Variable.
  This is valid:

      $var = 'Field';
      if($object instanceof $var)
      { 

  This is valid:

      if($object instanceof Field)
      { 

  This is invalid:

      if($object instanceof 'Field')
      { 


- Most of the documentation is quite good though.

Answer 7

one of the bigger challenges as mentioned is UI design, and getting your designs to render properly with the whole gamut of browsers and their versions. for example the IE6 box model vs. IE7/8.

the point mentioned about not trusting your user shouldn't be taken lightly as well. on the web, if it can be hacked, it's only a matter of time until it is. it is always important to validate your user input server side (even if you've validated it client-side as this can be bypassed by a malicious user), and make sure you never pass a variable from the query string into the database without ensuring that it's safe and not an injection attempt.

also consider the scalability of your applications. on the desktop, unless you're writing a server or client/server app, you've got one user at any given time. when you're working on the web you could be dealing with multiple (tens, hundreds, even thousands of) concurrent users. ensuring that you're using memory wisely and that your DB queries are efficient becomes all the more critical.

Answer 8

Security; cross site scripting, HttpOnly cookies, etc. There's a lot there.

Web frameworks; take a look at Spring, for example. There's a lot there.

ORM tools; Hibernate, for example. There's a lot there.

HTML, JavaScript, AJAX, CSS; for none of this being too complex, there's an awful lot there. Take a look at JQuery. JSP, custom JSP tags, JSTL.

If you haven't run into it already, Apache Commons saves you a lot of code.

Answer 9

There are few things :

You need to

familiarize yourself with javascript.

keep different browser in mind if you are dealing with websites, with in house web application mostly you restrict your user to one browser but its good to have support to all browsers.

You are moving from java to web app .. ASP.NET is a good choice.

Understanding of CSS is necessary.

Jquery .. first thing you need to get, you will love it

Session .. cookies very important ... because http is stateless. you need to store information in sessions.

connection strings ...

There are a lot more hope to write some more latter

Answer 10

Get comfortable with the end-to-end stack, without frameworks, before you start getting into some of the big frameworks like JSF, Rails, Django, etc. This way you'll have a better fundamental understanding of how things work in case you run into snags.

If you plan on using a different language than Java for back-end stuff, learn the new language first before you learn any web-specific things. There are lots of cool new things to get used to with the various dynamic langs (Ruby's blocks, for example).

Answer 11

You'd do great as a GWT programmer, I would assume. Google Web Toolkit. Have a look at it. Thanks.