For a non-technician, it is often very difficult to find himself in the meanders of Web technologies, especially as they evolve very quickly. Here are the basics you need to know to understand your developer. There are two major families of languages in the web:
- Technology called "front-end" that interact with the web browser of the user and display web pages, which creates a basic brochure site.
- Technology called "back-end" that interact with the server and the database, which allows to store and interact with datas in a more complex site as a commercial site.
Ruby is a server side programming language, that is to say, it runs on the server side. To create a website, use a server language but also a scripting language that operates in the browser. On the browser side, there is mostly Javascript. It should be added to that the knowledge of languages that are not programming languages as such, but which serve to present / communicate / store datas : HTML, XML, SQL ...
In everyday life, ruby on rails developers therefore use on the server side, the Ruby language. With an open source framework : Ruby on rails more often.
The skills of the Ruby developer
The essential skill to have for a Ruby developer, of course, is the ability to know how to code in Ruby and namely using the open source framework Ruby on Rails. But his technical skills should not stop there : he also needs to know HTML and CSS, JavaScript, jQuery or the Agile methods.
Why HTML and CSS ?
HTML allows you wholesale structuring datas of a web page (images, text, videos, forms, titles) and to create links between pages. HTML alone, allows you to create a static site of the type of the 2000s.
HTML alone, allows with difficulty to make a beautiful site. The code quickly becomes very "dirty" if you have to manage the disposal of the different blocks, fonts, font sizes, background colors etc. It is why the presentation of web pages is managed in another language, CSS. The CSS enables centralized in a file all aspects related to graphic design of the entire site.
