Introduction
It all started with Tim Berners-Lee at CERN and good old HTML. CERN, now famous above all for its Large Hadron Collider, recently gained great publicity by drawing attention to frivolous news stories chasing the possibility of a black hole. I think that even cooler than a black hole that marks the end of humanity, is the virtual world that has greatly impacted its evolution. The Internet came into being in part due to the outcome of CERN research and now we have a world besides the real world, running in parallel and becoming the flesh and blood of a terrestrial species that one day drew on cave walls. Later, HTML became the lingua franca of a world that was getting bigger while making our real world smaller.
HTML is the basic language understood by all WWW (World Wide Web) clients. It can run on a PC running any operating system like Windows, Mac, Linux or on a Unix workstation. However, its computing power is intentionally limited because it can prevent dangerous programs from running on the client machine. Web developers, now much more sophisticated in their applications, provide different types of services to a growing demand for interactive content. Today, most users have competent client machines that are capable of doing much more than HTML allows. Fortunately, there is constant development in the field, and today the number of capable apps is expanding. We can easily create database-driven websites with various scripting languages like PHP, ASP.NET, JSP, Perl, Cold Fusion, etc. This gives programmers a headache. They generally fall into two main groups: proprietary and open source, both of which have their own share of the market.
The languages mentioned below are all attempts to create the “ideal” web programming language, usually achieved by extending and constraining existing languages. Web programming languages have a variety of ancestors: scripting languages, shell languages, markup languages, and conventional programming languages. This document attempts to present a brief introduction to the most important languages used on the Web today.
Characteristics of web programming languages
There is a diverse range of languages available and suitable for web programming. There is no reason to believe that any one language will completely prevail and monopolize the web programming scene. When you’re developing a simple website, the question of which programming language and framework to choose may arise for things like contact submission forms, photo galleries, jQuery Slider, or any other web server-generated dynamic content component. When looking for a web designer or developer, you’ll hear them say “We program in PHP” or “We develop in ASP.NET/C#” and you might wonder what they’re talking about and which one is better than the other.
As you can see, there is a pretty good selection of languages for web developers to choose from to develop their web applications. There are many more languages available, some of them more specialized like VRML, but discussing them is beyond the scope of this article. Most developers have a working knowledge of at least some of the frameworks, but tend to specialize in one.
New languages and language extensions are being developed to increase the usability of the Internet on a daily basis. Here we will look at some of the important languages that have shaped the Internet over the years and give a brief description of each one.
ASP.NET – Active Server Pages
The .NET Framework is the infrastructure for the Microsoft.NET platform. It is an environment that can be used to create, deploy, and run web applications and web services with easier and faster programming.
ASP.NET runs inside IIS, which comes free with Windows servers. Allows scripts to be executed by an Internet server. This web development technology is built on the .NET Framework and uses full programming languages like C# or VB.NET to create web applications. I personally really like C# and think it’s a great language to code in and extremely easy to use.
ASP.NET dramatically reduces the amount of code required to build large applications. With built-in Windows authentication and pre-app configuration, safety and security are assured. But the main disadvantage is that ASP.NET applications can only run on Windows platform.
PHP
As an open source alternative, PHP is constantly being developed by an active and highly dedicated international community. This is a great example of strength in numbers. Another strong point of PHP is, of course, its low cost. Since it is open source software, PHP can be compiled and customized for any operating system. In fact, there are always precompiled versions available for the operating system of your choice. In an open, collaborative, and non-hierarchical environment, suggested improvements can be quickly adopted. You can count on its fast-paced updates and improvements more than other languages.
I think PHP is a good investment because it’s not going away any time soon. It is used by a very large group of fantastic programmers who create amazing websites that combine PHP with other technologies. It’s also a good idea that if you’ve invested in an online business and lost one of your precious programmers, it will be easier to find a replacement programmer.
Java/JSP
Developed by Sun Microsystems, Java is a very powerful object-oriented language. JavaServer Pages (JSP) are web pages with embedded Java code. The embedded Java code is executed on the server, then the page is returned to the browser for viewing.
Unlike ASP, JSP is much less platform-specific and less dependent on Microsoft for support or performance improvements. Java programs for Unix can be run on Windows or Mac systems with little or no effort. Many development projects are being carried out on the Java platform and it is getting richer day by day.
You should not confuse JSP with Javascript. Please note that Javascript is a programming language that runs in a web browser and does not require any server software. Since all execution takes place in the browser, Javascript is responsible for most of the interactivity on a web page. Image change or text color change on hover, creation of mouse trails are possible through Javascript.
pearls
Perl does not provide the desired graphics and security for Internet programming on its own. However, those functions are now available through Perl/Tk. Perl/Tk, which extends Perl with access to Tk’s GUI library and makes it fully available for web programming.
Perl is an open source language that is both mature and powerful. It offers web developers all the tools they need to create dynamic websites. Like other open source languages, it benefits greatly from continuous development and the support its international community offers is incredible. Perl is particularly good at creating unique websites quickly, cleanly, and elegantly. Its biggest weakness is that it can be unnecessarily complicated. If you don’t feel comfortable switching gears between different syntaxes, you should choose one of the other alternatives.
Piton
Like Java, Python is a full-featured, yet extremely easy-to-use, object-oriented language developed by Guido van Rossum at CWI in the Netherlands. Like almost all other great languages, it was initially developed in a Unix environment, but is available on PCs and Macs, and the applications are portable across platforms. Python’s syntax resembles C and C++, but it doesn’t stick closely to those languages.
Python offers several portable GUI libraries. Python is simpler and easier to program than Java and well suited for Internet programming.
cold fusion
Built by Allaire in 1995, bought by Macromedia in 2001, and finally ending up in the hands of Adobe in 2005, this ColdFusion may not be as cool as nuclear cold fusion, but it introduced some exciting technology that keeps an active community of developers together. . to this day.
ColdFusion enables developers to create dynamic, database-driven web applications. With its own markup language (CFML) and tags to connect to the database, it’s relatively easy to create dynamic forms and pages. Using ColdFusion, creating websites couldn’t be easier! You can implement powerful web applications and services with minimal training. It provides a suitable application development platform for network software. It is now at version 10 and supports most major databases, from Oracle to Microsoft SQL Server.
Ruby and Ruby on Rails
Ruby is an open source, object-oriented, dynamic programming language. It has a very clean syntax which makes it a lot of fun to use. Python is easy to learn and use, and enjoys a lot of the pragmatism of Perl. Ruby’s simplicity, productivity, and ease of use have spread its use very rapidly in a matter of a few years.
Ruby on Rails is their open source web application framework written in Ruby that follows the Model-View-Controller (MVC) model. It is highly productive and can power industrial strength web applications. Scale from the simplest expense tracking app to full-featured apps with thousands of users.
Finally
Web is the summa summarum of all these languages. There is no single application that does all the different things, in different ways, according to all the needs of the programmers. Due to the diversity of programming tasks, choosing a language has become a critically important step. It has to be decided afterwards by analyzing a project and considering every aspect of its requirements.