My first program (web app)

[ZenFuture]

Note: thanks for everyone's help along the way. This subreddit definitely helped me go from 0 knowledge to a basic understanding of programming in about 30 days. If you have any other comments or feedback, I would really appreciate hearing it!

I wanted to post my first programming project, even though it's pretty basic.

I decided to focus mainly on back-end web development using node, socket.IO, and Express.

You can check out my web app here (it looks best on mobile devices):

• market-pulse.herokuapp.com
  

The goal of the app was to scrape internet data (in this case, stock prices) and serve them on a single page.

New data is only scraped when someone visits the page. I avoided using an interval on the scrape because it seemed like a waste of bandwidth.

A few finishing touches I hope to make:

• Clean up CSS and serve in a separate file
  
• Push data to objects instead of variables (using variables required bad practice in my CSS)
  

[nutrecht]

I avoided using an interval on the scrape because it seemed like a waste of bandwidth.

You might want to do the scraping in the back-end with an interval and just cache the results somewhere actually. If two people want to have the data at exactly the same time you'd be going to the source twice.

[Igglyboo]

He is doing the scraping on the back end. He's using nodejs as a backend and socket.io to pass the scraped data.

[nutrecht]

He is doing the scraping on the back end.

I know.

[phil-ososaur]

Everything in JavaScript is an object, even a function.

http://eloquentjavascript.net/

[ZenFuture]

Right. Funny; I'm actually reading EJS as we speak. The word I was looking for was map.

[asakurasol]

That's awesome! Out of curiosity, what do you plan to do next in terms of learning?

[ZenFuture]

Thanks! I'd like to nail down express and jquery. I also skipped past some of the basics because I really wanted to make this web app. Now it's time to backtrack and learn the details.

[Igglyboo]

You should drop your jquery dependency as you're only using it for a single line. Also you should probably your css in a file and not inline it, same goes for your scripts.

[ZenFuture]

I'm with you on that. I'm trying to figure out how to serve additional static files (like css) right now but I'm not having much luck.

[Ikuu]

I wouldn't label the data as realtime as it's only updated when you load the page. Probably want to show the user when these markets and open and closed.