A scripting language allows you to take your website to the next lever, from a series of static hard coded web pages, to a website that will interact with the user, draw data and history from its database and intelligently calculate what the visitor needs to see. There are many scripting languages out there at the moment and more come on the horizon so we will just discuss the main ones that have become industry standards. When considering a scripting language to learn and use, if you haven’t already used one, should be a mix between your past skills and what you need from your site.
PHP is becoming the main scripting language for most internet sites and scripts. It is based on C and C++ so if you have experience of these it will be of great benefit. Combined with Linux, Apache and MySQL (often called LAMP - LinuxApacheMysqlPhp) it forms a powerful engine which will allow you to do almost anything you need for a dynamic database driven site. You can combine PHP with normal HTML and other languages fairly easily, and the website www.php.net is a very good resource for finding the information you need on functions and variables.
ASP is probably the second biggest scripting language, it can be run in either JAVA (a derivative of C) or VB (Visual Basic) which is of particular interest to those older programmers who grew up using windows. It is a Microsoft scripting language and supported by them. It offers many of the same features as PHP and can combine with MySQL, MS ACCESS or MS SQL to name a few of the databases. Its use is however declining.
ASP.NET is quickly taking over from ASP. It is a much reworked version of ASP and is also released by Microsoft. It allows a greater scope and much cleaner coding practices then the older ASP and includes languages like C#. It would be strongly recommended if you wish to use ASP, that you instead learn ASP.NET. The main restriction is that in order to utilise the full functionality of ASP.NET, you need to run it on a windows IIS4.0 + web server (ideally IIS 6 or 7). Very few Linux servers will support ASP.NET at all, those that do will have limited functionality support.
CGI/Perl used to be the widest used programming language on the internet and is also very similar to C and C++. It is extremely powerful in what it can do but with that power comes a lot of complexity and some users new to scripting might find it a challenge to pick up at first.
ColdFusion is the last language we will discuss, unlike the others this is designed purely to allow those who are less able or willing to learn scripting code to be able to design a powerful site using a WYSIWYG (WhatYouSeeIsWhatYouGet) editor. Unlike most other web design tools, this allows you to interface directly with a database and perform a large number of powerful features. It does however require your host support ColdFusion so bare this in mind if you decide to go for this option.
PHP is becoming the main scripting language for most internet sites and scripts. It is based on C and C++ so if you have experience of these it will be of great benefit. Combined with Linux, Apache and MySQL (often called LAMP - LinuxApacheMysqlPhp) it forms a powerful engine which will allow you to do almost anything you need for a dynamic database driven site. You can combine PHP with normal HTML and other languages fairly easily, and the website www.php.net is a very good resource for finding the information you need on functions and variables.
ASP is probably the second biggest scripting language, it can be run in either JAVA (a derivative of C) or VB (Visual Basic) which is of particular interest to those older programmers who grew up using windows. It is a Microsoft scripting language and supported by them. It offers many of the same features as PHP and can combine with MySQL, MS ACCESS or MS SQL to name a few of the databases. Its use is however declining.
ASP.NET is quickly taking over from ASP. It is a much reworked version of ASP and is also released by Microsoft. It allows a greater scope and much cleaner coding practices then the older ASP and includes languages like C#. It would be strongly recommended if you wish to use ASP, that you instead learn ASP.NET. The main restriction is that in order to utilise the full functionality of ASP.NET, you need to run it on a windows IIS4.0 + web server (ideally IIS 6 or 7). Very few Linux servers will support ASP.NET at all, those that do will have limited functionality support.
CGI/Perl used to be the widest used programming language on the internet and is also very similar to C and C++. It is extremely powerful in what it can do but with that power comes a lot of complexity and some users new to scripting might find it a challenge to pick up at first.
ColdFusion is the last language we will discuss, unlike the others this is designed purely to allow those who are less able or willing to learn scripting code to be able to design a powerful site using a WYSIWYG (WhatYouSeeIsWhatYouGet) editor. Unlike most other web design tools, this allows you to interface directly with a database and perform a large number of powerful features. It does however require your host support ColdFusion so bare this in mind if you decide to go for this option.
posted by paul85 at
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