I've been reading lately about SPA and how good it is..
I was wondering if someone could tell when should I use or even better when shouldn't I use SPA as go with regular MVC
The tooling for MVC (Rails, MVC4) is much more mature. There is far more documentation focusing on the development of traditional MVC sites. Single Page Application development is HARD. JavaScript-dense applications are difficult to write and can be extremely difficult to debug.
If you want to jump into SPA, look into John Papa's video training series on Pluralsight.com - which, to my knowledge, offers the best starting point for developing SPA apps. Or study Backbone, but that's simply not for the faint (feint?) of heart.
One futher suggestion: if you're a ASP.Net developer, look into BreezeJS (http://www.breezejs.com) for data management.
This blog post gives a good overview of some of the potential issues with SPAs, along with some suggestions for workarounds.
The potential issues include:
Browsers are not the best species in memory handling and garbage collection. Specially when it comes to DOM handling. For example, elements removed from DOM are stil held in memory. If we let users to
work on DOM for a long time without a refresh, Browser might struggle
to cop up with memory issues
We should ideally reuse as much as DOM elements without disposing. But even with that approach, if the user creates thousands of reusable DOM elements as she uses the application, browser may suffer in coping up. On the other hand, the memory leaks created by bad coding practices will too pile up in a long lived DOM.
If we need the complete product suite functionality to be available as a single page application, it can be too much of JS/CSS code to be
loaded at once impacting the initial load time.
I've been reading lately about SPA and how good it is..
SPAs just invert the responsibilities of the browser-client. Traditional server-side applications do most of the work in the backend. SPAs do most of the work on the front-end.
The good thing is, generating views in the client means front-end devs can do all of their design in the browser without having to worry about touching the backend.
Decoupling View from Model (ie controllers exist on both ends) means that the data can be exposed as a REST API on the server and re-used for clients that target other platforms (ex mobile, tablet, smart tv).
Eliminating the need to refresh every time a page is loaded makes for a better user experience.
I was wondering if someone could tell when should I use or even better when shouldn't I use SPA as go with regular MVC
Switching over to building SPAs from server-side MVC architectures can be very challenging for some. Many devs who work exclusive in a server-side language may just hate having to deal with Javascript (esp devs who program exclusively in statically-typed languages).
Making SPA's work requires some url-rewriting and redirect workarounds. This may be a very confusing/harrowing experience to get working for those who don't have a lower-level understanding of the server.
Users that have Javascript off by default will not be able to load the site.
A SPA introduces a lot more load on the client, with everything running in the main context this can make the UI slow/unresponsive. There are workarounds to solve this issue in newer SPA frameworks but it's good to keep it in mind.
Writing code code for the browser is a lot different than writing code for the server. There is a lot more complexity (ex the DOM) in the browser.
The toolchain for front-end development is drastically different from what you'd find being used to develop most server-side languages. Some programmers live-and-die by their IDEs.
Fetching data dynamically via Ajax can be extremely difficult at first for some. Especially, devs who don't have a solid understanding of HTTP.
Really, it comes down to one question. Do you want to take the time to learn how to build SPAs?
Related
Most web frameworks are still using the traditional action based MVC model. A controller recieves the request, calls the model and delegates rendering to a template. That is what Rails, Grails, Struts, Spring MVC ... are doing.
The other category, the component based frameworks like Wicket, Tapestry, JSF, or ASP.Net Web Forms have become more popular over the last years, but my perception is that the traditional action based approach is far more popular. And even ASP .Net Web Forms has become a sibling name ASP .Net Web MVC. Edit: Maybe my perception was wrong because of the impression of increasing interest in Wicket. If I ask Google Trends, there is much more growth in the tradional MVC frameworks.
I think the kind of applications built with both types of frameworks is overlapping very much, so the question is: Why are action based frameworks so predominant?
the component based frameworks like
Wicket, Tapestry, JSF, or ASP.Net Web
Forms have become more popular over
the last years
[Citation Needed]?
I seriously doubt this claim. MVC has taken over the .Net blog/twitter sphere. Its really hard to find somebody saying "we'll use webforms for our next project".
MVC fits the stateless nature of the web better. Component frameworks are an abstraction web developers didn't want.
Why are things more popular? They are several reasons: because of a good user experience, fast development cycle, cheapest things, etc
But sometimes
the loudest
or most hyped (rails, although it is great ;-))
or most arrogant (apple)
or the things with the most aggressive marketing (microsoft)
will win.
That is called evolution.
BTW: I am with Thevs. The component based frameworks will be the final winners (like GWT/Vaadin or wicket).
Inertia. Once you've invested a lot in one technology, it becomes progressively more difficult to change to something better. And it is not 10 times better, because then everyone (even the CEO) would have seen the change is needed.
I believe it's because action-based frameworks give developers (and designers) more control over the appearance of the page. Component-based frameworks try (unsuccessfully, IMHO) to hide the fact that the web is the web. They try to make web programming something like programming a native desktop widget toolkit like WinForms or Cocoa.
But the web is very, very different from that. I think action-based frameworks are popular because they recognize this.
EDIT
Apparently some people have misunderstood what I mean by this, so let me be clear. I'm NOT criticizing web application that appears to users to function like a desktop application. I have absolutely no problem with that.
What I'm talking about is the underlying coding methodology and philosophy. Each tag in a tag library system renders HTML in a certain way, analogous to a widget in a desktop programming library like Cocoa or WinForms. Some systems allow you to customize the rendered HTML, but this can sometimes be non-trivial to accomplish. It will render CSS classes and so on over which you either have little control or have to make a special effort to control. It pretends to be a black-box solution, but it cannot possibly be, because if you want to style the rendered HTML or target it with JavaScript, you have to understand its structure and so on.
I suspect that developers are using MVC frameworks as a simple way of exposing services, not as action-based web app frameworks (this is pure speculation on my part). i.e. they are using them for AJAX requests. I would predict that the concept of action-based frameworks quietly goes away over the next couple of years, along with (to some extent) the concept of MVC in this context.
I think you only see these frameworks showing all around. But most programmers use in-house (custom) or much more simple framework models (like ExtJS or JQuery) and silently do their job.
EDIT: By the way, I think MVC model is trying to mimc the old and probably obsolete business/presentation separation model which was proposed for legacy applications some time ago.
I see no future for this model (2-3 years from now). AJAX is already changing all the way you're working with backend.
This question contains a lot of background information, to make sure you fully understand why we are looking at these technologies.
The question is basically this:
For a large, spreadsheet-type, module that we need to develop for our webmodule for our application, are there any pitfalls we should know about if we decide to use Silverlight for it?
Issues we already know, and don't need any discussion/reminders about:
We're aware of the problems around using a plugin-type solution, which may or may not be installed on the users machine (and in some cases, probably can't be installed). These risks needs to be mitigated, but we're aware of them. Please don't get hung up on this.
We're a .NET company, so while ruby on rails and lots of other different platforms and architectures are good for this solution, they are not in the scope of the decision here. We have lots of code already written in .NET that we need to take advantage of, otherwise the project will never be finished regardless of platform.
Background
We have a web module for our application with employee-related information and some input forms. Our Windows desktop application is mostly a department leader type of application, to manage employees, but the web module contains mostly employee-centric functions. The web module contains mostly report-type webpages, to list information from the system, or input-forms.
The module we need to add now is more of a heavy spreadsheet type application. You change something one place, and something changes somewhere else, like sums, what is enabled/disabled, etc.
We know we can manage all of that with AJAX, but another issue here is that the application will potentially load a lot of database data in order to put the data in front of the user, and with a AJAXy solution, we're afraid that the request/response method here will have to reload quite a lot of information on every request, even to respond to seemingly easy questions.
A way to mitigate that would basically be to load information into a Session-object or similar, but that's a big no-no, so we'd rather not do that. This is a multi-user module, and some of the data is rather static, but some of the data is also going to have to be refreshed from time to time, so if 10 users loads a lot of data into the session, that's going to be a pretty big memory-hit.
We will be using ASP.NET (MVC) for this if we choose to go this route, that is, developing the module in pure HTML and similar technologies.
Then we looked at Silverlight, and would then load all the information down into the Silverlight application on the client. It would hold the current state, and would only need to touch the database to refresh some of the information, some of the time, instead, as we think the request/response model with ASP.NET (MVC) would work, on every little request.
But, since we have only done minor things with Silverlight, we're not that experienced with it, and we're afraid that some assumptions we might have, stated or unconcious, turns out to be wrong or flawed, which will make this project impossible or very hard to manage at some point.
For instance, just to take an example, is there a limit to how much memory the Silverlight application is allowed to load (I know, if I have to ask I can probably not afford it), for instance if there is a limit on 10MB, then that would be nice to know about before we're midway and start to load the really heavy data.
To make it simpler to give examples, let's just assume we're building a spreadsheet, that has so much data, that for the simple "changed a number here, what else changed", too much data from the database has to be loaded for a proper request/response model to be used, and if we move the entire thing to Silverlight, what will make that project hard or impossible?
Knowing about such things would at least give us the ability to consider if the price is acceptable.
In short, why should we not use Silverlight for this and instead go for ASP.NET (MVC)?
And again, "use Ruby on Rails instead", is not really an answer here. The options are ASP.NET (MVC) which we have experience with, or Silverlight which we don't but can gain.
Of course, if Ruby on rails, given that we'd have to start pretty much from scratch infrastructure-wise, and have to learn a new programming language, and framework, and download and learn a new IDE/tool, if it would still allow us to cut the development time in half, then please give us some information about how that might work, but I daresay that won't really happen here.
You should know that Silverlight (version 3.0) does not support any printing whatsoever, which to me sounds like a whopper of a showstopper for you (sorry, I couldn't resist). The good news is that full printing support has been added in version 4, but that is still in beta. Rumours say it should be out before the summer if everything works out according to plan, so if that fits with your roadmap I would use SL4 right from the start.
There are no memory limitations in Silverlight, but for the local storage (IsolatedStorage) mechanism there is a default limit of 1MB. But you can easily get around that by asking the users permission to increase the local storage space when he/she starts up the application. More on that here: Silverlight Tip of the Day #20 – How to Increase your Isolated Storage Quota.
(Edit)
Aside from the missing printing functionality that will be fixed in SL4 I cannot see any problems with your scenario. I would easily take the Silverlight route if I were you, especially since you already have extensive knowledge of .NET/C#.
For a rich interface as you've described, I would definately go with Silverlight or Flash rather than a html/javascript/ajax solution.
These technologies make for much better and consistent interfaces across platforms, you can buy in various components to speed things up and support things like copy-n-paste and code in a more structured way.
Another element is skills, if you have the skills to achieve it in a particular technology, then go with that.
To the answer you question the best way I can; you should not use silverlight if you decide to use flash.
HTH
How to show benefits of adopting asp.net mvc to client?
I mean - we as developers can understand benefits of easier implementation of automated testing, better control over rendered html etc., but what would be strongest motives for client to accept usage of asp.net mvc?
Maybe there's some more nice looking examples built with asp.net mvc (excluding stackoverflow) to show?
p.s. Please, do not start flame war.
In this case - it doesn't matter if asp.net mvc is better than x or vica versa.
This question might be a little subjective, but I will take a crack at it anyway.
--Background:
MVC was picked for me before I started at my present company and I was charged with learning it, which suited me fine as I am very HTML oriented. The project is in development but we have iterative meetings to show progress and flesh out requirements. In one of these meetings I found a major payoff:
--My Experience:
The question of whether the site could support mobile phone access was put forth but up until now I had been designing the site for a 1024 x 768 minimum resolution. No worries, I simply turned off CSS Styles and the page displayed in a not-very-pretty-but-very-functional flow. The entire site is designed semantically making it easier to port to different front ends via style sheets and maybe a little JS. ASP.net MVC is awesome for semantic websites, which are cheaper and easier to maintain.
--More Stuff
This is one of several benefits of adopting a web technology that more fully embraces the medium it runs on. Others include:
Better separation of model view and control logic, because well its MVC, but this makes you code more loosely coupled, and more single-responsibility-principle adherent ultimately making it cheaper to maintain
More standards based, meaning its easier to use JQuery and CSS tricks that all the cool kids are using, because those really shine in well formed sematics-based documents. This means its cheaper to add flair
Restful, URL - driven requests. Your URL does not specify some .aspx to load and do a ton of work across a bunch of layers in its poor little code-behind. Your URL specifies a request which causes the router to invoke model-layer functionality which runs where it is supposed to, then dumps pertinent data to a view. Lots of good stuff here:
This makes it easier for one controller to serve up pages, webservices, AJAX, and handle all CRUD cases, but all around a single context.
Each responsibility is handled by a method called from the router, each group of related responsibilities can be materialized into a controller.
You control what data goes where, you can custom build a view model to go out to the view, and the view simply contains logic to show it, making things simple and secure especially if the people working oon the view are not the people working on the controller logic.
There's a lot more but in the time I have taken to type this, all the other answers have probably been posted.
Clients typically don't care what technology is used in building their website, so I would use cost as the driving factor for using ASP.NET MVC. Let the client know that their cost will ultimately be lower if they choose technology X (even if that isn't necessarily true). The bottom line is a powerful negotiating tool.
For the most part clients don't care about what is going on under the hood so long as it is
cheap
reliable
maintainable
compatible with anything they currently have
Cheap is easy to sell, ASP.net MVC is free. Reliable? It is built by Microsoft and that is an easy sell to most PHBs. Maintainable? This is a bit trickier since it is a new technology and there aren't a whole lot of experts. However the selling point here is that it is much closer to pure HTML than, say, webforms so should be easy for almost any developer to maintain.
Compatible is harder, but you can use user controls in MVC if that is what they have. This one you'll kind of have to solve for yourself as it is client specific.
This is a layered question:
Why use .NET - capability and performance (and there's no harm in saying its a technology you're comfortable with). IIS7 is turning into an very impressive platform.
Why use ASP.NET MVC? The key sell to a client here is the level of control you have over the output - this is a tradeoff you decide to take on board as a developer, you have more control so in some respects you have more work to do however the win for a client is in the resulting pages which should be smaller, more standards compliant, more search engine friendly and generally all the things that a public web site should be.
But if its for an internal site you have to actually make a more considered judgement, forms works, you can produce very good results and if you know the environment its going to be deployed into you may find that you're more productive with the building blocks it provides than with MVC.
As an aside, there's nothing to stop you using the strengths of the MVC model in web forms - the fault we tend to be most guilty of is failing to separate the logic correctly because its too easy not to, but from a clean slate you can be aggressive in what you allow.
I'd go the other route, find some crappy ASP.NET Web Forms sites to show them. Should be pretty easy. :)
I've been learning ASP.NET MVC for about a month now and I'm certainly sold on its benefits but I realize it is not applicable to all situations.
I've read in several places that ASP.NET MVC is not ideal for data-intensive applications:
Example 1: "Data Driven Application – life would be MUCH easier using WebForms if the application is data heavy"
Example 2: Nick Berardi's book suggests that you side with Web forms if your application is "data-heavy"
Can someone clarify as to why ASP.NET MVC is ill-suited towards data-heavy applications and why Web forms are more appropriate? Also, where does one draw the line between data-heavy applications and other applications? Are we talking quantity of data (millions of records) or are we talking large data models?
I would really like this clarified as well, as I have found the exact opposite to be true, and I think stackoverflow.com is evidence of the suitability of MVC to data-driven apps.
I didn't bother reading much of the second link, but the assertions in the first are not qualified, and many of them seem wrong to me. The stated weaknesses of WebForms, though, would be enough to drive me from using it for a data-intensive app:
UI logic coupled with the code, and thus is hard to separate.
Harder to unit test, so difficult to employ TDD.
Heavy page sizes due to view state management.
The stated weaknesses of MVC are quite flimsy:
Not event driven, so maybe difficult for people who know only Asp.Net Webforms to wrap their minds around it.
Third party control library support is not that strong.
No ViewState(this is also a strength).
The first one can be seen as a plus as much as minus. The second is just wrong as MVC apps can leverage traditional server-side controls if they wish, as well as make use of the rich library of client-side controls and libraries. The third, well I don't think I even need to speak to that one...
You have to be wary when reading articles like this on the internet - they sound authoritative and comprehensive, but where is the meat? Why are the stated weaknesses an issue? It is not enough to just throw opinion out there as fact. They should be backed up with metrics, such as when using platform x over y, developers unfamiliar with either platform were able to complete an application 30% faster, or platform x resulted in 25% fewer lines of code, or fewer levels of indirection, or whatever.
The idea that RAD is a plus is another one that bears careful examination: RAD is fast until you want to do something a particular control was not designed for, and then you hit a brick wall. It is a leaky abstraction and when it fails, you are suddenly confronted with the full complexity of understanding the design framework and code of the given control. This can be quite a setback, and the source code for these controls is not always available.
Doesn't make much sense to me. They might be speculating on the difficulty of creating many models if you have lots of different types of data, or perhaps the relative difficulty of creating web forms in MVC.
However, ORMs (such as L2Sql, EF and Subsonic), model binders, and form generators (I can't find the link right now) pretty much hose those arguments.
Frankly I don't buy it.
I believe that these authors are talking about the ability to drag/drop data controls onto the page such as GridViews, FormViews, and other databound objects.
Say you have a database for your IT department, with a table for computers, a table for printers, one for software, etc. The UI for this is a very simple data management system, essentially a glorified MS Access.
Rather than writing an elegant web app, with beautiful HTML and a class library, you could simply create a quick/dirty WebForms app by dragging your data sources and controls onto the page in Visual Studio.
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I have BS in Computer Science, and thus have experience developing software that runs at the command line or with a basic GUI. However, I have no experience making real, functional, websites. It has become apparent to me that I need to expand my skills to encompass web development. I have been using Ruby to develop applications, but I am aware that it is quite popular for web development. I want to use my skills as a programmer to assist me in developing a personal website for a band.
I have experience with HTML, but very little with CSS. I want to leverage my skills with programming languages to create a website containing pictures, audio clips, a dynamic calendar, a scheduling request tool, and other features common to band websites.
What kind of resources are available for a competent desktop programmer to learn the entire process for developing a website? Is it best to use free CSS templates and WordPress as a foundation for my site or make it from scratch? Should I use GUI tools or write it all in Vim/Emacs? Is Ruby on Rails sufficient for my personal website, or should I consider a more mature development platform?
My main goal for this project is to come up to speed on current web design technology, and actually understand the entire process for building a website.
I think one really important thing to understand in web development is HTTP. HTML and CSS are important, but I think it's more critical to understand the stateless nature of the web, and how each of the HTTP verbs work, and what they can/can't do.
http://www.freeprogrammingresources.com/http.html
A good tool for seeing how HTTP works is Fiddler.
If it's as much a learning exercise as anything then take an iterative approach. Build revise. Build revise. My (very) rough guideline below:
Client
Start with the structure of a website and concentrate on the client.
Use notepad and build a bunch of static pages for your band. i.e. Hand code initially. Try to build all your pages with CSS. No table markup. Then play around with some Javascript to bring things to life. (Navigational menu\ Calendar selections\etc). Learn about how to import and link to Javascript and CSS files.... and how these files are treated re:caching etc.
Try to learn up to the limits of what you can do on the client (generally). Factor in the nuances of 3-4 browsers (Firefox/IE6/IE8/Chrome) re:DOM and client side eventing.
Server
Then start looking for what you might want to change across pages/sessions. i.e. what needs to be manipulated server side. And pick a server side technology.
Start with basic post-back processing. Forget databases at this point. Learn how your framework of choice maintains state..... not just the name of the technology but the real nuts and bolts of it. One of your single greatest assets as a web developer is understanding the state model(s) of the technology you're using.
Then go for a deep dive on the web server technology of choice (and in general). Understand the full request pipeline from client to server and back. This will teach you forms, http and its verbs, web server, filters and modules, server to framework hand off, page and control life cycles, back to the client.
Now start working on dynamic content injection and the like. How to make and use reusable components in your web pages.
Databases, caching, performance and diagnostics.
Then get into into all the fun stuff like ajax, etc. Replace your javascript with jQuery, etc.
Then you got the whole Webservices\XML\JSON\etc side of things to discover.
Resources
Well the web obviously. For client side stuff, going to the sites of companies who make third party web controls can be quite interesting. Asking how the hell they did that? Viewsource is your friend. Look at how they structure and build their pages. Pick a couple of good web designer sites, and you find a plethora of rants about browser wars etc that will give you good (under the hood) info.
Once you hit server side, I'd go for white paper type learning from your vendor of choice for your technologies.i.e. webservers/frameworks/etc. Again find a 3rd party howto/evangelist site (I used to use a lot of "4 guys from Rolla" for example) that will demonstrate how to do various things. Language learning is ongoing. Basically just do the best you can till you find a better way.... and always be on the lookout for a better way.
You really need to understand html, forms and css to get anywhere. I say forms as this will give you the round trip needed to understanding the stateless nature of web dev.
To further labour the point, I have interviewed many people who think you can only have one form on a page and can only have one submit button per form. This is all down to a lack of foundation knowledge.
So for that I'd recommend starting with htmldog.com.
After that, a lot of web development is done with frameworks. Gone are the days where you do it yourself (well mostly) but my above point still stands. You do need to be able to peep under the hood with some confidence.
I've been doing web development for 12 years and started out with Perl on Solaris and Linux. Since then I've also done Java and more recently ASP.NET. However, I'm slowly falling for Django in my private projects.
What I've found over the years is that the inherent problems - cookies, javascript, presentation, state, authentication are all the same but just handled differently. So ultimately its down to you and your language preference. Plus a little of enlightened self interest when it comes to potential employment.
Programming aside, you should also become familiar with web servers (Apache and IIS spring to mind), Http codes and headers, Mime types and encoding and FTP. As well as Javascript (mentioned already), plugins, browser platforms and good development practises such as using Firebug, Fiddler and so on. It also wouldn't hurt to have a good idea of the image formats available, image optimisation, CSS sprites, content compression, caching and the like.
All depends on where you want to start!
For a newbie, I'd pick Django and (obviously) Python. Good, clean language with cheap startup options, low cost IDEs (ie free) and hosting your sites is very affordable.
But that's just a subjective opinion.
If your goal is to
My main goal for this project is to
come up to speed on current web design
technology, and actually understand
the entire process for building a
website.
Then start from scratch in Ruby, PHP, Java, ASP.NET, etc...
When you run into a design problem or just want to know how others have approached something, then look at the frameworks.
Once your up to speed, and your website is starting to grow, then segway into a framework, to get up to speed on the frameworks.
I agree with John on this one.
As you know from your own experience in pursuing your BSc, understanding the basics of any language is what makes you even more capable in expanding that knowledge or specializing.
With that in mind, it would be best to understand the basics of HTML and CSS.
Understanding the syntax and overall language will help in the future when you want to pursue large projects using frameworks like Django and Rails. The basics will also especially help with tweaking CMS' like Wordpress to be more customizable to your needs.
One thing in particular that I'd like to mention is that web programming, like many other forms of programming has its own special structure and "proper" way of doing things.http://www.w3.org is a great way to ensure that your work is passing general web design standards, most sites don't follow this because it is tedious, but from a learning perspective it ensures that you get a nice strong foundation.
www.w3schools.com is also a great resource for detailed help on web programming. Lastly, I like colourful code, so I like using basic text editors such as notepad++ or notepad2 or gedit to do my web coding. GUIs like dreamweaver may tend to fill up your code with extra junk and spaces, so I don't recommend them, but they are still great tools.
Don't bother with Rails yet -- write CGI scripts in Ruby. It will be very similar to what you have done for class.
After you have about thirty of those under your belt, you'll know what you want out of a web framework.
I'm a Computer Scientist and a web programmer and I would suggest you learn both HTTP and CGI:
CGI Made Really Easy
HTTP Made Really Easy
As the titles of the above tutorials claim, they made the concepts "really easy" for me.
Once you've got CGI and HTTP down pat, I'd suggest checking out following sites that provide a wealth of articles and references for web programming:
webmonkey
w3schools
Mozilla Developer Center
Assuming you want to concentrate on writing web apps, then Perl, PHP, Python and Ruby are all fine choices (I myself use Perl predominantly) and I'd suggest doing some research into the popular web frameworks available for each language.
Most importantly, pick something simple as your first web app, e.g. a form and a page that shows the results of submitting that form. Some good examples (using Perl's CGI module) can be found here:
CGI.pm - a Perl5 CGI Library -- see the first set of links on this page.
When you want to start writing web apps that use a database, read up on SQL and popular libraries/modules in your chosen language for database manipulation, especially ORM (Object-Relational-Mapping) interfaces that allow you to deal with records in an Object-Oriented fashion.
Good luck with it! Being a web programmer is fun because your audience is teh intarwebz! :)
If you are starting from scratch as per John MacIntyre's suggestion, you may lean towards PHP. With all of its shortcomings, it does have one really good user manual. It is also easy to get started with and is installed on pretty much every host and goes well with Apache.
Also, w3 schools is good to begin learning about CSS and XHTML but don't forget to check out the specs at W3C.
Also, please read this Stack Overflow question & answers.
For what you're describing, Rails or Django might be slight overkill but it wouldn't hurt to learn them. Django, in particular, might be good because of the notion of a project containing multiple apps (e.g. calendar).
Whether you use a framework or write everything yourself, though, you'll need to know HTML and CSS. CSS is extremely simple if you have a BS in CS...you could read a tutorial and know it in five minutes.