Which Web Language?

When choosing web design languages, make sure you take some time to research your options to ensure you're making the best choice for your project.

When you think about the language you are using to design your website keep in your mind “what is important about web design language, and what part of web design efforts can you take or leave?”.

If you like to create and publish your own web or blog, your first step should be to decide what type of web you would like to create and what web design language you would like to use.

 

Hypertext Markup Language (HTML)

HTML, which stands for HyperText Markup Language, is the predominant markup language for web pages. A markup language is a set of markup tags, and HTML uses markup tags to describe web pages.
This language is so simple you can type the syntax into a text editor, such as Notepad, save it with an .html extension and instantly have a web page. HTML can also be used to include Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to define the appearance and layout of text and other material. The W3C, maintainer of both HTML and CSS standards, encourages the use of CSS over explicit presentational markup

 Although HTML will enable you to create simple web sites, if you want something more dynamic, you'll need to look into using other languages:

You can learn more about HTML here:

http://www.w3schools.com/html/

 

CSS ( Cascading Style Sheets )

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language used to describe the presentation semantics (the look and formatting) of a document written in a markup language. Its most common application is to style web pages written in HTML and XHTML, but the language can also be applied to any kind of XML document, including SVG and XUL.

CSS is designed primarily to enable the separation of document content (written in HTML or a similar markup language) from document presentation, including elements such as the layout, colors, and fonts. This separation can improve content accessibility, provide more flexibility and control in the specification of presentation characteristics, enable multiple pages to share formatting, and reduce complexity and repetition in the structural content (such as by allowing for tableless web design). CSS can also allow the same markup page to be presented in different styles for different rendering methods, such as on-screen, in print, by voice (when read out by a speech-based browser or screen reader) and on Braille-based, tactile devices. While the author of a document typically links that document to a CSS style sheet, readers can use a different style sheet, perhaps one on their own computer, to override the one the author has specified.

You can learn more about Active Server Pages here:

http://www.w3schools.com/css/css_intro.asp

 

PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor (PHP)

Hypertext Preprocessor is a widely used, general-purpose scripting language that was originally designed for web development to produce dynamic web pages. For this purpose, PHP code is embedded into the HTML source document and interpreted by a web server with a PHP processor module, which generates the web page document. As a general-purpose programming language, PHP code is processed by an interpreter application in command-line mode performing desired operating system operations and producing program output on its standard output channel. It may also function as a graphical application. PHP is available as a processor for most modern web servers and as a standalone interpreter on most operating systems and computing platforms.

PHP was originally created by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1995 and has been in continuous development ever since. The main implementation of PHP is now produced by the PHP Group and serves as the de facto standard for PHP as there is no formal specification. PHP is free software released under the PHP License.

It is a highly popular, server-side scripting language that can be embedded directly into HTML coding.

PHP can do anything that CGI (Common Gateway Interface) can do, such as process form data and auto generate dynamic content. However, PHP can do much more. It can be used on all major operating systems and supports most web servers.

PHP's main focus is development for the web, so it has a quick development time and can solve scenarios much quicker than some of the other web design languages.

You can learn more about PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor here:

http://www.php.net/

 

Java Server Pages (JSP)

JavaServer Pages (JSP) is a Java technology that helps software developers serve dynamically generated web pages based on HTML, XML, or other document types. Released in 1999 as Sun's answer to ASP and PHP,[citation needed] JSP was designed to address the perception that the Java programming environment didn't provide developers with enough support for the Web. 

The JSP technology enables you to combine regular, static HTML with dynamically generated HTML.

You can learn more about Java Server Pages here:

http://java.sun.com/products/jsp/docs.html

 

Ruby

Like many web frameworks, Ruby on Rails uses the Model-View-Controller (MVC) architecture pattern to organize application programming.

Ruby on Rails includes tools that make common development tasks easier "out of the box", such as scaffolding that can automatically construct some of the models and views needed for a basic website. Also included are WEBrick, a simple Ruby web server that is distributed with Ruby, and Rake, a build system, distributed as a gem. Together with Ruby on Rails these tools provide a basic development environment.

Ruby on Rails relies on a web server to run it. Mongrel was generally preferred over WEBrick at the time of writing, but it can also be run by Lighttpd, Abyss, Apache, nginx (either as a module - Passenger for example - or via CGI, FastCGI or mod_ruby), and many others. From 2008 onwards, the Passenger web server replaced Mongrel as the most used web server.

Ruby on Rails is also noteworthy for its extensive use of the JavaScript libraries Prototype and Script.aculo.us for Ajax.Ruby on Rails initially utilized lightweight SOAP for web services; this was later replaced by RESTful web services. Ruby on Rails 3.0 uses a technique called Unobtrusive JavaScript to separate the functionality (or logic) from the structure of the web page.

You can learn more about Ruby on Rails here:
http://api.rubyonrails.org
http://rubyonrails.org/documentation 

 

Active Server Pages (ASP)

 Active Server Pages, also known as ASP, is Microsoft's solution to dynamic, interactive web pages.

 Active Server Pages are web pages that contain scripts in addition to the standard HTML tags. These scripts are processed prior to a web page being displayed within a web browser.

 Unlike standard HTML pages that have an .html or .htm extension, Active Server Pages have an .asp extension.

An advantage of ASP is that it is language-independent and therefore is easy to use across all platforms and applications. It is very flexible and powerful, yet some people don't like it merely because it is a Microsoft product.

 You can learn more about Active Server Pages here:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/dnasp/html/asptutorial.asp

JavaScript

JavaScript (nee LiveScript) is Netscape's scripting language for integrating HTML, Netscape plug-ins, and Java applets. It is based on Java, and is mostly syntactically compatible, but differs from Java in that it is interpreted, rather than compiled, only supports built certain built-in objects and user-defined functions, rather than full support for user-defined classes with inheritence and methods, is integrated with HTML, rather than invoked from HTML files, weakly typed, and dynamically bound. JavaScript is meant to extend HTML to be more of a full programming language, but retaining HTML's ease of use. The principal criticism of Java programming is that it much more complex than HTML programming, more like C++ programming, and therefore is not as accessible to users as HTML. This is an issue that JavaScript attempts to address. 

You can learn more about Java Srcript here:

http://www.w3schools.com/js/default.asp

Python

Python is an interpreted, object-oriented language developed as a full-featured, but easy to use, scripting language, by Guido van Rossum at CWI in the Netherlands. Initially developed in a Unix environment, Python is now available on PCs and Macs, and applications are portable across platforms. Python has developed a substantial, although still modest, following, as a scripting language, an application development language, and an embedded extension language. Python's design was most influenced by ABC, a little known language also developed at CWI. Python's syntax evokes C and C++, but doesn't stick too closely to those languages. Python fans tout its clear, intuitive syntax in comparison to C, C++, Java, Perl, shell languages, and most other interpreted languages, the completeness of its type system and its suitability for significant application development in comparison to Tcl , and its extensibility with Python and C/C++ libraries. Like Java, Perl and Tcl, Python offers a portable GUI library, several really. Perl advocates complain about the lack of regular expression matching and output formatting natively in Python. Perl is a little more of a sysadmin's shell language than Python, and Tcl is a little simpler and less capable. Python is more of a regular programming language, but simpler and easier to program than Java. But, all are suited to Internet programming. See Python Compared to Other Languages for a list of comparisons between Python and a variety of other languages. Safe-Python is a design for changes to add safety to Python. Grail is an web browser which supports the download and execution of Python applets in a safe Restricted Execution Mode. Grail uses the Tk GUI library.

You can learn more about Python here:

http://www.python.org/doc/