Article
Advanced Web Design: A Primer
Perl (also: PerlScript)
Perl is a programming language that excels at manipulation of text. As such, it is ideally suited to the development of dynamic Web pages. This isn’t to say that advanced Web design is the only application of Perl – it is heavily used in the automation of administrative tasks on Unix-based systems, for example.
Perl programs (or “scripts”, as they are commonly known) can be installed either as CGI programs or as server-side scripts using the mod_perl plug-in for the Apache Web server (in which case they are sometimes said to be written in “PerlScript”).
Resources:
- www.perl.com from O’Reilly
- Introduction to Perl for CGI on WebMonkey
- Intro to Mod_Perl on WebMonkey
PHP
Personal Home Page, PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor, or simply PHP, is a somewhat less flexible language than Perl, but is more specialized towards the creation of dynamic Web pages. This focus means that you can do pretty much anything you can do with Perl using PHP when it comes to advanced Web design, but with simpler syntax (making PHP easier to learn).
Designed for use as a server-side scripting language (whereas Perl was not originally designed for use on the Web), this language bears similarities to other common languages (Perl, C/C++, Java, JavaScript), to make it easy for existing programmers to use.
Resources:
- Building a Database-Driven Web Site using PHP and MySQL on WebmasterBase
Active Server Pages (ASP)
Active Server Pages (ASP) is a framework for running scripting languages like VisualBasic and JavaScript as server-side scripting languages. Developed by Microsoft, this is mainly supported by Microsoft-brand Web Server software. As a solution for creating dynamic Web sites, ASP basically fills the same role as PHP, but with some degree of freedom in your choice of programming language. The trade-off is a loss of freedom in your choice of Web server software.
Resources: