I’m a self-taught web enthusiast at the level of integrating and editing JS and PHP, Ajax scripts on simple responsive websites using a text-editor and my own server. I set up and displayed a few MySql tables, understand the structure of CMS, but I don’t yet have a sense of app development exactly. I have gotten more into JavaScript, and see the idea behind event driven behaviors and the step by step executions necessary in programming, broadly at least in terms of graphic interface.
So, I want to make a simple app with some minimal, graphic-based functionalities, random outputs of user inputs. Would Mozilla’s Appmaker be a place for me to start? Or is there some other direction?
Other than the actually programming, is there anything else I need to learn to possibly become an app developer, taking into account IDE’s, version-control and lots of other stuff related to programming on larger scales?
Version Control – familiarity with git workflow.
Smart Debugging – xdebug.
Symfony, Laravel – Familiarity of modern frameworks and design principles embodied within that promote code structure and organization.
Vagrant – Virtualization of local environment to decrease time of devops/system oriented tasks.
Ember.js is a framework written in JavaScript. Therefore, it is unable to communicate directly with resources stored on the server such as; pulling data from a db. Laravel could be used server-side to bridge the gap providing an API which Ember.js can use to fetch data from the server indirectly. For that matter any server-side language and/or framework could be used to provide an REST API for an Ember.js application. I’m actually currently building something following that spec but using angular js instead. Where angular js is used client-side and Laravel server-side providing a REST api to my application to handle standard CRUD operations via AJAX.