Newsletter of the East Bay Chapter of STC
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Meeting Report: October 2004

by Liz Miller
EBSTC Senior Member

"Web Skills You Need to Know"

Technology is developing so fast that, according to our presenter Bryan Allo, “even the science fiction writers have given up trying to predict the possibilities!”

For the East Bay STC October meeting, our visiting e-solutions consultant offered a web developer’s perspective on the technologies that can best dress up your resume. He started with a high level overview of today’s hottest acronyms—some familiar, some not.

Alphabet Soup for Your Resume

Bryan Allo speaking on web skills

Client side technologies support the presentation and user interface provided by web browsers. Remember the old battle to make sure our web pages displayed properly in both Netscape and Internet Explorer? That is no longer an issue, thanks to general compliance with standards defined by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

If you want a job supporting the client side of web application development, your resume should reflect a working knowledge—if not hands-on skills—with the following:

HTML – Hypertext Markup Language (know paragraph and character formatting tags)
JavaScript (not to be confused with Java) – A browser-managed command language used within pages defined by HTML
CSS – Cascading Style Sheets are indispensable for page presentation and allowing global modifications across a web site
DOM – The Document Object Model enables a browser to convert an HTML document to objects with specific properties and capabilities
DHTML – Dynamic HTML web pages that any browser can read are made possible by integrating JavaScript, CSS, and DOM

On the server side of web technology, your resume will look better (and the soup a bit thicker) if you can claim a basic familiarity with one or more of the following languages:

PHP5 – A robust, open-source hypertext preprocessor that works on all platforms
ASP – Active Server Pages
JSP – Java Server Pages
CFML – Cold Fusion Markup Language
Perl – Practical Extracting and Reporting Language (CGI scripts)
Others: TCL, Python, C/C++, C#, .NET

Web database technologies such as MySQL are behind most applications that require a user ID and password.

Bryan Stirs the Soup

Bryan expects web server technology to continue to evolve while new automation makes it ever more transparent to the user experience. The technologies we do have are becoming more robust, secure, and smart in handling transactions. In the longer term, expect more transparent applications and more widely distributed processing. For example, imagine your own “hip pocket” web server to gain wireless Internet and Global Positioning System (GPS) as immediately accessible, always-on services.

Currently Bryan is working as a web applications developer with VIN (Veterinary Information Network). His work supports message boards and a comprehensive searchable database of journals, articles, message board archives, and conference proceedings.

In his years working with the Boeing Company, Bryan supported the company’s technical documentation efforts by automating publication processes and developing tools to aid in production and maintenance of aircraft maintenance manuals, Department of Defense documents, and more.

Alphabet Soup Resources

Melody Brumis presents a gift to Bryan

To retain top marketability in his field, Bryan likes to read books and write his code “from scratch to keep it clean.” For his STC audience, he highly recommends the “For Dummies” books. He named two of these along with several web URLs in the Recommended Resources he shared in his presentation.

And don’t forget, as an EBSTC member of the O’Reilly User Group Program, you can buy any of this publisher’s books at 20% off. Just enter the code DSUG when ordering online at O'Reilly.

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