Advanced Web Design: A Primer

Server-side Technologies

Server-side technologies for advanced Web design are largely the result of users’ desire for Web sites to serve as large, dynamic, interactive, and customizable sources of information that is kept constantly up to date. When these goals fall on your lap as a Web designer, you quickly realize that your trusty HTML editor just isn’t up to the task.

Consider the official Olympics Web site, which at the time of this writing is providing event results and other coverage of the Summer Games in Sydney, Australia. If you live in one of the lucky countries that is getting live TV coverage of the Games and have checked out the site, you were probably impressed by the fact that results on the page are so up-to-date that they often feature headlines such as “At the halfway mark, the race leaders are as follows…” that are as fresh as what you’ll be watching on television!

How is this possible? Does IBM (the company responsible for producing the site) have reporters editing HTML on laptops at each of the events? Of course not! Not only would this be a management nightmare, but it would be impossible to produce results of the quality and reliability that can be found on the site without a lag time of several hours (consider the mess of updating the medal tally pages when several events are occurring concurrently!).

No, plain HTML pages are definitely not up to this kind of task, and neither are any of the client-side technologies we saw last time. With the possible exception of Java, which can do just about anything a software program can do (but then IBM would have been just as well off making people download a full-blown program to view Olympic results), client-side technologies are all either too unreliable (in terms of browser support) or not powerful enough.

As we have mentioned, server-side technologies are the solution here. While basic Web server software simply sends HTML files in response to requests from Web browsers, server-side technologies expand on the capabilities of the Web server to allow it to dynamically generate HTML web pages by running programs, connecting to databases, and doing other fancy stuff in response to a browser request.

The big advantage of server-side technologies is that they don’t rely on any special features of the Web browser making the request. A dynamic Web page created using JavaScript (a client-side technology) requires that the browser understand the JavaScript language that the page was written with. A dynamic Web page created using PHP (a server-side technology), however, can be viewed in any browser that understands HTML, since the PHP code is run and converted to plain HTML on the Web server before it is sent to the Web browser. Thus the term: server-side.

Since only the Web server itself needs to support any given server-side technology used to build a site, there are a lot more options out there in this area. In this article, we’ll cover the most widespread of these to give you a good idea of what’s out there.