Prayagasoft - web designer India, Ecommerce developer india, Ecommerce design

Server Side Technologies

Server-side technologies are the way that you can take your Web site to the next level. Server-side technologies can be regarded as those technologies that enable you to dynamically generate HTML, CSS. Let's take a quick example to get things clearer. Take Amazon.com for example. Amazon won't make separate web page for each their product. Wait. If you pay a close look to an Amazon.com's page, you'll notice that it has many other contents that are presented depending on the product you are viewing like 'related products', 'product review'. That's not all! You'll notice that you can post a product's review on the site, and it'll appear instantly. Do you think that there's someone behind the screen to paste your review and save it as an HTML page for you to view on your browser?! No! And if I can recall back from my statistic classes, the number of different page combination and permutation, would certainly exceed thousands of Gigabytes!

So here comes the wonders and magic of server-side technologies. Come to think that the 'someone' we mentioned earlier is the web server. So the task of generating HTML pages is left to that of the server. The instructions needed to decide on what content are to be included in the HTML page is made possible through CGI or server-scripting languages which will be discussed later in this article.

To thoroughly understand the significance of server-side programming languages, it is appropriate to examine the weakness of HTML. HTML produces static web pages, or web pages that never automatically change. To alter any static page, you must make it happen.

A server-side document is written in any text application, like Notepad, and is uploaded to the web server. The document containing this script is saved on the web server. When someone makes a request for a page from his web browser the script file is sent to the appropriate interpreter and the code is executed and HTML is automatically generated from the executed code. The resulting document is pure HTML, and the user requesting the document, will never see the actual scripting language.

By making use of server-side technologies, highly interactive web applications can be built, and customized to the user preferences. Web applications can be made to interact with databases or other files, to store, retrieve and perform other data manipulation tasks. More examples and applications will be given throughout this section.

CGI

The Common Gateway Interface (CGI) for executing external applications on Web Servers. Suppose you have an HTML file on your server, and someone makes a request to access that file from his browser; since HTML is static, it won't change, and its content will always be the same. Now say you have a CGI program on your web server, it is executed in real-time, so that it can output dynamic information upon user request. A CGI program can be written in any language that allows it to be executed on the system, such as: C, Perl, TCL, Visual Basic etc. CGI is losing popularity these days while the rise of server-side scripting language which is explained below.

Server Side Scripting Language

Server-side scripting language involves PHP, ASP, and JSP (don't be bamboozled with these acronyms, they will be explained in this article). The role of server-side scripting language is the same as CGI but with server based scripting, instead of the code outputting the lines of the Web page; the Web page itself contains the code. Furthermore, the server usually has the interpreter built in, so it can serve up lots of requests with much lower resource requirements.

ASP

ASP stands for A ctive S erver P ages and is a division of Active Platform concept of Microsoft Technologies. To have a better understanding of what ASP is and how it works, let's break the terms:

Active - means that the HTML is created dynamically by your ASP pages.

Server - refers to the fact that there is a server involved in the process, thus it is a server-side technology compared. The resulting file is a pure HTML file

Pages - means that the HTML file is sent to the browser which displays the HTML content of the ASP file in its window.

Actually the ASP command set comprises of scripts, mostly VBScript, though usage of JavaScript is not uncommon. ASP can be made to interact with a MS Access database to perform data retrieval, storage, sorting etc, and afterwards deliver the result in HTML form. To run ASP pages, you need to have a server that supports ASP or run ISS or Personal Web Server on your local machine.

ASP is great for creating almost any kind of dynamic web content from discussion groups to shopping carts. ASP is ideal for simplifying tasks that would otherwise be very cumbersome or impossible in HTML.

PHP

PHP or Hypertext Preprocessor PHP is a free, open-source and cross-platform programming language. PHP is a server-side technology and is handled in a similar way as ASP pages by the server. PHP script has much in common with Perl, Python and JavaScript. PHP can interact with mySQL databases and many other databases, thus making data storage and retrieval easier. PHP is being increasing used on the Net, and is the most popular server side language. Most webhost nowadays support PHP, and PHP runs of many servers such as Apache, ISS, etc. PHP is the choice if you want your web application to be a little more flexible and highly interactive.

mySQL

Without the use of databases, the Internet would be something impossible. A database allows you to store information in a categorized way, making data storage, retrieval, sorting and other data manipulation tasks easier. As we've seen above with ASP and PHP, these scripting languages can be made to interact with databases. mySQL is a one of the fastest SQL (Structured Query Language) database servers currently on the market is the MySQL server. Compared to other databases servers on the Net, mySQL has quickly gain popularity due to its various features. Some of theme includes; storage of millions of records, very fast queries (command) execution and ability to handle multiple users and user's permission.

ColdFusion

ColdFusion was originally designed by Allaire, and then bought by Macromedia. The main part of ColdFusion is the ColdFusion Server, and ColdFusion Markup Language (CFML). CFML is a unique language, as it is tag based, similar to HTML. Beginning server-side programmers might find ColdFusion the easiest language to learn, as it is broken up in tag blocks. ColdFusion is so easy to use you can have a database driven site up in about two hours, even if you know no SQL and have only a small data store to build from. ColdFusion gives you all of the benefits of CGI plus easy database access and simple to create forms and dynamic pages. ColdFusion is available for the different platform including Unix and Windows operating systems. It is supported by many authoring tool and is well documented.