Website Building with Primary Computer Languages

As the world wide web has matured over the past few years, so have the languages that web sites are built with. While HTML is still the backbone on which the web is built, the means in which it is created and enhanced has drastically changed. In just the past few years, many new scripting languages have been developed to make web sites more dynamic than ever. Usually these scripts interact with a database to create rich, content-full sites that provide information and/or entertainment for their users.

Currently, the two most popular styles of dynamic pages are ASP and PHP pages. ASP stands for Active Server Pages and run on Microsoft Windows servers and are usually written in VBscript, although JScript (Microsoft version of Javascript) can also be used. PHP pages differ from ASP pages because they can be run on both Windows servers, and linux, and other unix servers. They are named from the actual language they are written in as well, PHP. PHP is a recursive acronym that stands for PHP: Hypertext Protocol.

In addition to ASP and PHP, web scripts can be written in ColdFusion (a scripting language developed by Macromedia), JSP(Java Servlet Pages developed by Sun Microsystems) or the very traditional CGI scripts. CGI is a generic term for any script that dynamically interacts between a web site and a user. CGI stands for Common Gateway Interface, and was one of the first means for web site publishers to create dynamic content on their web sites. Most CGI scripts are written in either perl or python, but can also be written in C or practically any interpreted scripting language such as Ruby or Lisp.