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Advanced Web Design: A Primer
Cold Fusion
A Web server with its own built-in server-side scripting language in one product, Cold Fusion is designed to be easy for inexperienced users to set up and learn. Unlike some of the above-mentioned solutions that are free, Cold Fusion is a commercial product. It does come with a helpful authoring environment, but with PHP, ASP, and others becoming more and more easy to learn and use, Cold Fusion is losing popularity.
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Server-Side Java (Servlets, JavaServer Pages, etc.)
We already mentioned Java in the client-side portion of this article as a language for creating “Applets” – small programs that run in Web pages using a “Java Virtual Machine” (JVM) embedded in the Web browser. Java, as a full-blown programming language, however, can run just about anywhere – including on the Web server computer. In the past few years, plug-in JVM’s for Web servers have endowed them with the ability to run Java programs as server-side scripts.
While this technology has been growing in leaps and bounds in areas where complex and bulletproof functionality is expected from a Web page (in eCommerce applications, for example), Java on the server side is just as intimidating to learn as Java on the client side (if not more so). If you’re an experienced programmer, then server-side Java is an extremely powerful tool to add to your repertoire; otherwise, you’ll probably want to steer clear in favour of a simpler solution like PHP or ASP.
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