I have definitely gained an appreciation for JavaScript after completing this project. JavaScript really lets you take control of the DOM and manipulate data represented on your app without having to refresh the page. This makes your app run a lot faster and creates a better user-experience.
My personal computer is particularly slow anyway, but when I have to host my own server my comptuer takes even longer to load and refresh pages. Thankfully, even with my slow computer, I was able to quickly (…relative to how my computer usually functions) render JavaScript since the requests I made with JS are dealing with a lot less data than fully refreshing a page. This experience really highlighted the utility of JS and how helpful JS can be for poor internet connections.
Besides better understanding how useful JS can be to web application, I also gained more confidence using JS. I was very intimidated by JavaScript when I first started learning about it. I felt very spoled after using Ruby for so long, given that Ruby is a very forgiving language allowing you to accomplish the same task with many different avenues. However, with JS, I felt like I had a lot less flexibility regarding JS’s syntax. After working throug this project, and also utilizing JQuery (a JavaScript library that allows you to use JS with significanlty less code), I found myself excited to utilize JS in my app. I felt like I had a lot more control over my app and over the user experience since I was now able to add functionality that allows for DOM manipulation, therefore making the app easier and faster to use.