WEB TECHNOLOGIES

Today, the world wide web(WWW), alias Internet is ubiquitous. Everyone is connected to this information gateway through one way or the other. Even a kid of second standard knows how to play online games on the internet. Now, how all this stuff works….

Let’s try to unfold the secrets layer-by-layer.

The most basic web page is an html page, which can be coded in Notepad, and run on a web browser (IE, Mozilla, Opera,Safari,Mosaic, Google Chrome)…

HTML means hypertext markup language, a language that the browser understands. We have three basic entities, a client, a server and a host. Taking an example, you have to open your Gmail inbox. As a client, you send a request to the server, where the Google is hosted, by specifying the hyperlink (complete address) of the web page, along with your user name and password. A server is a software that acts as an intermediary between a client and host. It takes the requests from client, processes them, connects to the database (host) where your data (all the messages of your inbox) are stored, and returns to the client in html format. There are various server-side scripting languages, which run on the server, process user requests, connect to the database and output the html to the client. They are as follows:-

1. JSP:- Java Server Pages. It is based on Java language. It is the most secure language, but simultaneously, very costly to implement. There are three stages in Java Technologies

a)      Core Java, which deals with all the intricacies of the programming tools and object-oriented paradigm, which serves as the basis of this language.

b)      Advance Java, which deals with the applet programming. An applet is a small application running within a large program. You can embed various applets within your web pages to enhance GUI, as applets follow event-driven programming. Example applets are- calculator, analog clock, etc.

c)      Enterprise Java, includes JSP and servlets, and various advance features like EJB,AJAX,etc.

2. ASP:-Active Server Pages. It is the Microsoft’s answer to Sun Micro System’s                  Java language. Microsoft provides an integrated development environment “Visual Studio” for development in ASPX (an extension to ASP), with the .NET framework. Visual Studio is very-much developer- friendly, very easy to learn.

The most famous web-server to be installed on your system to run JSP programs is “Apache Tomcat “ , which you have to explicitly install. Also, you have to install an SQL database (use MYSQL, its nice) to store all you application data. The advantage here is freedom to choose various products, whereas with Visual Studio 2005/2008, you have an IIS Server, SQL Server Database integrated with the .Net Framework.

Also, JAVA is open-source, and with Microsoft’s ASPX, you have to use Microsoft’s products only. The choice is purely yours.

3. PHP:-HyperText Pre-Processor. To a beginner in web-development, it is the most famous and easy-to-learn web-technology. The PHP Servers are least expensive in case you want to deploy you website, and the availability of XAMPP tools.

In industry, LAMP architecture is most famous, L-> Linux OS,  A->  Apache Web Server, M-> MySql Database, P-> PHP language. And X in XAMPP-> any operating system, like Windows, Linux, MacOS, etc.

So with all the different web technologies, all depends on the developer to choose the technology which satisfies nearly all his requirements.

With the availability of a large variety of Rapid Application Development (RAD)  tools, developing a website of your own is just a matter of 2-3 hours. There are services available, which give you a complete template of your website, all database connections, etc. and you just have to feed in the content. But this type of development is good for fun and experience. For serious and flawless web-development like the Google website, the developers have to be more mature, experienced and well-versed with the concepts of software engineering, which defines all the stages of development of a software product.