The Nettuts blog had a recent post about the skills required for web developers. This comes at an apt time for me. Our system might be going to the web sometime soon. The problem is that I am not a web developer. I am a client server developer. Usually that means you find another job. However I love the current project I am working on. I have been working on it for a long time. And I would like to continue this. Therefore it might be time to start shoring up my web development skill set.The first item needed for good web developers is knowing a popular framework. Yes I have seen all the hype about Ruby on Rails. I dismissed most of it as hype. The only frameworks I know are those for client server development. However the hot new frameworks like Django seem to be web based. Maybe I will give them some time.
The next item required for web devs is knowing how to create widgets. That also seems like a good idea. I got a little excited when there was much hoopla over Google Gadgets. However I thought it more of a marketing ploy than anything else. You build a Gadget and get people to visit your web site. Maybe there is more to it than this.
Another web dev area is content management systems. Due to my blogging interest, I would not mind learning Wordpress or Moveable Type. Right now I just am a Blogger user. However the time may be right to understand more of what goes on behind the scenes. Our company is getting into social networking. The time may be right.
There are a lot of other web dev skills that were listed in the blog. The only other one that seems of interest to me would be ecommerce. It would be nice to know how to implement a payment system on a web site. For this I would probably go with the Paypal solution as they are very popular.
So far I have obtained approval to attend a Java class at the local community college. The company is going to pay for me. However I can see myself taking a Javascript class next. I like to have a college class drive me to learn these web development topics. It will also give me a good chance to network with other web devs.
