Hello.
I really need some advice here, and could not find a better place.
I am faced with a very difficult for me choice about what technology to use for web development.
I love programming / coding btw.
I tried to learn PHP and ColdFusion at the beginning of this year. PHP training material was so boring it litteraly put me to sleep (thats VTC training for you), while ColdFusion from lynda was pretty exciting. I still looked into PHP from other ebooks and found it pretty interesting. But in the end i spent much more time in CF and became pretty fluent in it as i made apps to assist me in my school work (i am a high school student made a deputy head boy), made pretty nice working blogging system which i am constantly improving, and a bunch of other things.
Now problem is that it is a licensed server with a few zeros trailing behind the $sign, so i could not find a single free online publishing service to post my codes on (which are so far a hobby) to test it outside of my dev PC. This makes me ask if i made a right choice. I mean i love this technology but if i will be always struggling like this and have no way to test quality of my code by running it in a true multiuser environment then.... may be i should start studying PHP again and drop CF (since there are miriads of free services with PHP)?? And when i am planning to become series about WebDev, will i have a place to apply my skills to??
Then i noticed that my apps require some more user interaction without sending a request to server on every mouse motion so i became in need to learn some client side language as well. I cam upon Flex. Looked at it and realized that that is what i've been missing for a long time. I started digging into it but then decided to check on the price for a full version and..... $20,000. If i would not by laying in bed i would have fallen. No way i will be able to truly test my code if i get series about it, because no one in their right mind is going to give out free services for a product with such an expensive license.
So what do i do. If i continue developing CF and later Flex on my PC at home only, then i will not be able to publish my work for experts like you to rate quality of my code so that my skills can improve, (because right now i really need to put my blog out there so that i could see quality of my code when it comes to execution of more than one user as well as i want my friends to see what i am capable of doing and for them to rate it so that i could take out any garbage they did not like and put in what they want).
If that is the case then do i need to switch over to PHP before i get myself into more trouble?? (and i so dont like javascript :( )
I am so lost!!!!
