Recently I have been getting heavily into the wild world of web programming. Web programming is a large, dynamic and exciting field that is currently in high demand. More and more companies are changing their business models to offer subscription web services. It is certainly an exciting time to be a web developer. There is a lot of neat stuff available and a TON of ongoing development. I am enjoying it immensely, however, there are WAY WAY WAY too many web languages available.

Before I can even start on a project I have to pick the language I want to code in. Should I use Java, ASP.NET (if i do, i also have to pick an additional .NET language to run that with like C#, VB…), Ruby, Groovy, PHP, etc.

Once that’s decided, I have to think about what technologies I am going to be using WITH my language of choice. Whether it be Rails, Grails, Drupal, Wordpress, Spring, Struts, Tapestry, JSPs, JSFs, EJB3s among just a few.

On top of all that, I have to decide what clientside technologies to incorporate into my pages. Plain old HTML just doesn’t cut it anymore with the abundance of javascript libraries and technologies such as AJAX. Three of the most commonly used libraries are Prototype, Script.aculo.us and jQuery. Not to mention having to know things like CSS, XHTML, ORM tools like Hibernate, things like SOA, XML, CORBA, SQL and more.

As you can see, web programming nowadays is a huge task. It’s a far cry from what it was just a few years ago. I wish there was some way to combine all these wonderful technologies into a small easy to use package. I mean that was really the goal of the early enterprise JavaBean, but the complexity was huge. It’s probably not even a realistic goal, but today’s web programmers certainly have a daunting task.

For my next project, I think I will be attempting to use Groovy: Grails, with jQuery, CSS and Hibernate tied into a MySQL database. Good luck to me!