Programming environment for client side web development

I have lost 开发者_JAVA百科somehow connection to the world of web programming six years back or so. I would like to revive my knowledge out of pure fun and try out some new technologies. What would make a good development environemnt & combination of CSS and javascript templates? Canvas is popular these days instead of wrapping everything in tables, etc. What is a good and free HTML5 designer? I will not handcode html, nor CSS.

I am NOT interessted in specific serverside environments. I know about Django, wordpress, etc. but I would like to focus on the client side and websocket programming.

You could try Sencha. It is a very popular client side framework that you can use to construct real RIAs.

You can also try Sproutcore, which is a JS framework that might appeal to a server side developer because of the pure MVC nature of the framework. There is an example app on the blog that is linked in my profile.

• I would say JQuery is a must learn, and it's really a lot of fun too.

• I would also look into the suite of Google APIs. You can do a lot of interesting client side stuff. (For some of the mash-ups you'll need to do some server side programming though).