CS 453 - Resources etc.

Don't forget the Virtual Labs (see link above).

Editors etc.

• HTML/CSS editors:
  • Kompozer for Windows, Mac and Linux. Based on Netscape's Composers and then nVu. Try the latest "unstable" version 0.8 alpha4 under "Downloads". (Reportedly more stable than 0.7 which I've been using without problem.)
  • Amaya for Windows, Mac and Linux. From the W3C.
• Notepad++ (recommended!) for Windows. Notepad++ supports syntax highlighting and syntax folding for 48 programming, scripting, and markup languages. Downloaded 13 million times.
• SciTE, a text editor (not an IDE) that does syntax highlighting for several languages including JavaScript. The single-file version (Sc1.exe) weighs in at about 400K. It's a very nice step up from Notepad and the like when doing JavaScript. I hear that the editing component in SciTE (Scintilla) is what Adobe has adopted for their internal editor in their CS3 product.
• Aptana: an IDE for JavaScript etc. http://www.aptana.com

JavaScript etc.

• Tutorials at http://www.w3schools.com/js/
• E-Books available in UVa's Safari on-line library: http://proquest.safaribooksonline.com/search
      From off-grounds, you need UVaAnywhere-Lite WebVPN (Setup Info), (Use it!)
• http://www.javascript.com

Scripting Languages and Related Topics

• Perl: main site
• PHP: see "software bundle below"
• Tutorials on CGI programming: NCSA tutorial. Other recommendations? Email me!

Software Bundle: Apache, MySQL and PHP

See wikipedia article on LAMP for background.

• MAMP for Mac OS X
• Wampserver for Windows
  • If Apache doesn't start (check the tray icon), then it may be that Microsoft IIS is already running on port 80. You can check this from the WAMP icon: Apache->Test Port 80. If this is the problem, use Windows Control Panel to get to Services and hit "Stop" for IIS. See this link for details.
• Installing on Ubuntu and perhaps other flavors of Linux:

  Your mileage may vary, but this worked for me on Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) Desktop version. (If you're looking to try Linux, this isn't a bad choice.) Feel free to ask if you ahve questions about this! From a terminal window, I typed the following:
  sudo apt-get install lamp-server^
  (Yes, you need the caret-symbol at the end.) During installation, this will ask you to supply a root password for the MySql database system. (Pick something simple and memorable.)

  Once this completes, the Apache web-server will be running right away (and whenever you boot). Try it by looking at http://localhost and you'll see the page index.html in /var/www/. That directory is where your web pages will be stored. You may want to change the permissions there so you can copy or edit files in that.