Current Trends on Internet( languages)

Current Trends on Internet( languages)

HTML- Hypertext Markup Language

HTML- Hypertext Markup Language is the main language of the internet. It is the language used to develop web pages. Hypertext means that some text in the HTML document carries a link to a different location, which can be on the same page or another page. On clicking this ‘hot spot’, the viewer is transfer to that location. Markup means that specific portions of a document are marked up to indicate how they should be displayed in the browser. HTML simply consist of tags that are placed around elements, which then changes the properties of these enclosed elements. There are hundreds of HTML tags and some of these are proprietary, which means that only some browser recognize them.

·    Java

   Java is very powerful, object oriented                 language. Develop by Sun Microsystem. A lot    many platform dependency issues have been      solved with the advent of Java. Thus, Java program Unix can be made to run on windows or the Mac system with little or no effort. Much development is taking place on the Java front with new arrivals like Java beans, Extended Java Beans, and Java applications for various databases and XML. Using Java servlets one can also develop dynamic Java Server Pages (JSP). Java can also be seen on the internet In the form of applets embedded in an HTML page. Applets are small Java programs that run  on a Java compatible browser.

·    Jscript/ Java script

  It is programming language that run on a web browser. It was develop by the same folks who gave us Netscape and was first implemented in version 2 of the browser. Java script is not a subset of Java. In fact, the languages share little in common. Naming their language “Java Script”, was just a clever marketing ploy by Netscape Communications. It was initially called Livescript but when sun microsystem released Java and it became very popular, Netscape renamed their scripting language to Javascript. Javascript run on the browser and does not require any server software. Thus, it is a client-side scripting language. Since all execution takes place on the browser, Javascript is responsible for most of the interactivity on a web page. Image change or text color change on a mouseover, creating mouse trails are all possible through Javascript. The language has also been widely used for basic form validation. This seems logical, as it is better to validate a form on the client side than to make several trips to the server. JavaScript is commonly embedded inside the HTML page and is thus visible to the visitor.

JavaScript can also be written to run on a server and this is based on the ASP model promoted by Microsoft.  

·   CGI- Common Gateway Interface

The Common Gateway Interface (CGI) has been around for a long time. It allows the web server software to communicate with other programs running on the server. These external programs are called CGI scripts or CGI programs and are usually written in Perl or ‘C’. CGI programs are generally used to process information submitted by visitors via a form on a web page. For example, you might use the search form on a web site to look for ‘cars’. When you submit your query, the server receives your request, passes it to the CGI program. The program then looks up the search query term in a database and responds with the appropriate results formatted in HTML code.

·   PHP

Open source, great development environment- PHP is cult. This has been the answer of open source programmers to Microsoft’s ASP. PHP not only carries all the goodness of ASP but also is more secure and handles databases more easily. It is a known fact that PHP on Apache Web servers runs faster than ASP. PHP code is embedded inside the HTML page and can link to databases to generate dynamic HTML content. Furthermore, PHP scripts can be made to run on any operating system with little or no modification.

·   VBScript

VBScript is a client- based language that runs only on the Internet Explorer and quit naturally, has been developed by Microsoft. Though, the browser market share of Internet Explorer has steadily risen and overtaken that of Netscape, it is still not advisable to use VBScript as a client side language for web pages. I would prefer to use JavaScript as it runs on all popular web browsers- Netscape, Opera, Mozilla and the Internet Explorer. However, VbScript is very often used for developing Active Server Pages.

·   ASP – Active Server Pages

Active Server Pages is a technology promoted by Microsoft. The ASP utilizes some special tags, which can be embedded in the HTML code, to generate dynamic web pages. ASP scripts run on the server. ASP pages carry the .asp extension that differentiates them from plain HTML pages and instruct the web server to pass the pages through the ASP interpreter. You can use VBScript, Java script/Jscript or a combination of the two to write ASP pages the great advantage in using ASP is the ease of maintenance of the web site. However, the downside is that you become too dependent on Microsoft technologies.

·   XML- eXtensible Markup Language

The eXtensible Markup Language is a web page developing language that enables programmers to create customized tags. These customized tags can provide the much-needed functionality not available with HTML. XML documents can be accessed using JSP; PHP etc. there are several other languages on the internet such as perl, python, VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language), awk etc.