Web tech­nol­ogy is based on the client/​ server model. The client com­puter runs a web browser to see the web page. The soft­ware sends the request by the inter­net to the soft­ware pro­gram, which acts as the web server, run­ning on the server com­puter. This responds and the web page is sent back to the browser. The web server soft­ware which runs on the server com­puter has many helpers to per­form the tasks, which are the server side tech­nolo­gies for advanced web design. The tasks per­formed by the client side server, are all client server tech­nol­ogy for advanced web design.

If a file has server side script then, the script inside the HTML file is per­formed by the server before the file is returned to the browser as plain HTML It works in many ways:

1.    A web page can be dynam­i­cally changed, edited or any con­tent added to it.
2.    It can respond to any ques­tion or any data that is sub­mit­ted from the HTML forms.
3.    It can access any data or data­base. This results obtained can be returned to the browser.
4.    The web­page can be cus­tomized to make it more use­ful for each user.
5.    The server side tech­nol­ogy can pro­vide secu­rity. This is nec­es­sary as the server code can­not be seen by a browser.

Some of the ‘server side script­ing’ lan­guages are:

1.    ASP/ASP.NET (.asp/.aspx) – ASP or Active Server Pages was devel­oped by Microsoft for mak­ing advanced web pages in a web appli­ca­tion frame­work. It helps in build­ing dynamic web­site, web appli­ca­tions and web ser­vices. The most com­mon lan­guage is VBScript.
2.    PHP(.php) – PHP:Hypertext Pre­proces­sor is easy to learn. There are many ready­made scripts avail­able. It also helps in pro­duc­ing dynamic web pages and is a gen­eral pur­pose script­ing lan­guage. It runs on the web server and has to be con­fig­ured to process PHP code and cre­ate web con­tent. It is free of charge. Most web servers and oper­at­ing sys­tems and plat­forms can dis­play it.
3.    JAVA via Java server pages (.jsp) – This is a very pop­u­lar web server side tech­nol­ogy.  In this, the server tags are mixed with html. This is hard to learn and com­pli­cated. It has good pro­gram­ming tech­niques.
4.    Cold­Fu­sion Markup Lan­guage (cfm.) – This is from Macro­me­dia and this server is not free. How­ever, you can install a free ‘devel­oper edi­tion’. This can be used for devel­op­ing and test­ing your appli­ca­tions. It is easy to learn as it con­sists of xml/​html like tags. It is best used for web appli­ca­tions that are not too com­pli­cated.
5.    Perl (.pl) – It is also widely used. It is a pow­er­ful and advanced script­ing lan­guage. This is mainly avail­able in many cheap web host­ing pack­ages.
6.    Python (.py) – It is also easy to learn, but is not as widely used as PHP, ASP or even Perl. The dis­ad­van­tage with this script­ing is that it does not have a stan­dard web appli­ca­tion framework.

Besides these you also have Lasso(.lasso), Ruby (.rb) and SMX (.smx). There are all these server side scripts to choose from.

The most widely used server side script on Unix/​Linux plat­form is PHP. It is not only easy to learn, but also fast to pro­gram. The Java/​JSP/​Servelets is the pre­ferred choice for all the big­ger projects. An expert Win­dows pro­gram­mer will use ASP. Each one right from Cold­Fu­sion, Perl and Python are good, each hav­ing their own unique specialty.

It would be best for a begin­ner to learn one server script­ing lan­guage first. With the expe­ri­ence gained, he can then go on to learn­ing the other ones, as it will be easier.

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