Make no mistake: When you’re talking about web development, you’re talking about software development, and then some. My boss and director of the Interactive group I’m a part of at P+N agrees that “web development is software development.”

I’ve been working on a pretty big blog. That’s a part of it. Every day I’m at P+N, I realize that a true (and successful) web developer must also be a software developer.

Why? Well, I’m currently working on a Google-like search capability for a client’s site, except it has to search a database of client-uploaded documents. It has to:

• Be a weighted search. Meaning “microsoft software” returns different results than “software microsoft”, because the order of the terms determines their weight.
• Ignore noise words such as “and, but, the, a, in, or, for” etc.
• Sort the results on some kind of scoring; more relevant results must be at the top. Meaning, a scale of relevancy has to be dynamically determined based on the returned result set of the search. 10 results needs a different relevancy approach than 1,000 results.
• Understand expressions, like Google does. Meaning “this phrase” denotes an exact phrase, the + sign indicates a required term, and the – sign indicates a term that should not be in the results, anywhere.

Add to this, the search must include document metadata; which involves the joining of 10 tables or so. Yes… it’s rather insane… And I wouldn’t be prepared for it without my advanced DB classes from RIT.

But… more on all this soon. Just once I have the time to finish the actual blog…