Series: Start here « Alan Street

This entry is part 1 of 2 in the series Start here

I dream of having time on my hands. Ah, what would I do to occupy myself if I was a high-school kid dreaming to get a start in software development?

Knowing what I know now about how complicated developing software can get, I would try to do something very simple. In fact, I would want to make it as simple as possible.

First, I would avoid one of the least productive and most complicated parts of software development — setting up my development and test environments. I would look at developing in the cloud using a Platform as a Service (PaaS) such as IBM’s Bluemix.

Secondly, I would do it for free as much as possible. In luck…IBM provides a free DevOps and PaaS services!

Create a DevOps project. I created a Git repository (https://hub.jazz.net/git/alanstreet/)

Copy the sample project as described here, fork it, and build & deploy it as instructed. Run a test!

This entry is part 2 of 2 in the series Start here

When you start out to create a cloud-based app it helps to understand the environment that it will run including the components that are external to it as well as the framework and runtime components that are integral to it.

An app runs both on the device (client) and in the cloud (server) and invokes services on both platforms.

Much of the logic that you build into an app is in the form of JavaScript. On the server this might be application logic in the form of JavaScript running in the node.js runtime.

On the client side the JavaScript might be Dynamic HTML client-side scripting running in a browser or a mobile app.

JavaScript developers typically use standardized JavaScript code written by other developers in the form of libraries such as jQuery (on the client).

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If I had time on my hands…

Anatomy of a BlueMix App