Examples of languages available to implement Server-side programming

The market for server-side Web development solutions is a crowded one, these days! Perl, ASP, PHP, JSP, Cold Fusion and many more specialized choices abound. But you don’t need to learn all of them to do server-side programming, they all server the same function. What you have to decide is, which one does your job the best.

CGI

the Common Gateway Interface (CGI) was defined to allow to process user input and serve dynamic content on the Web. CGI programs can be developed in any script or programming language, but Perl is by far the most common language

CGI is supported by virtually all Web servers, the Common Gateway Interface (CGI) was defined to allow Web servers to process user input and serve dynamic content. CGI programs can be developed in any script or programming language, but Perl is by far the most common language

Perl

Perl is a "Practical Extraction and Report Language". Perl is a specialised programming language, which has been designed with powerful text-manipulation functions. Perl is an interpreted language and is easy to understand. Perl has been used for programming World Wide Web electronic forms, for its pattern-matching functions aids in system searches and reporting and generally as glue and gateway between systems, databases, and users.

Active Server Pages

Microsoft Active Server Pages (ASP) is a server-side scripting technology that can be used to create dynamic and interactive web applications. An ASP page at its core is simply a text file that has been named using the extension .asp and which contains HTML and scripting that are processed by a web server before being sent to the user's browser.

An ASP file can be created by including a script written in VBScript or JScript in an HTML file. The most common use of ASP is database connection.

The process of execution of an ASP file starts with the Web Server reading the ASP file, line by line, and it executes the scripts in the file. Finally, the ASP file is returned to the browser as plain HTML

ASP.NET is the latest version of Microsoft's Active Server Pages technology (ASP)

Java Servlets

An alternative to using CGI & ASP is a Java servlet, which is a Java class. Servlets are capable of handling web input, processing that input, and returning the processed input back through the web server, which is the HTML displayed in your browser. Java Servlets need the Java Virtual machine to execute, which is embedded in the web server.

You can think of them as server-side applets. The web server will load and execute them the same way a browser would an applet. Servlets can maintain state, are platform independent, and extremely extensible as they are written in object oriented Java.

Java Server Pages

JSP technology is an extension of the Servlet technology. It makes it easier to combine fixed or static template data with dynamic content.

Java Server Pages (JSP) is a technology that lets you mix regular, static HTML with dynamically-generated HTML. Servlets, make you generate the entire page via your program, even though most of it is always the same. JSP lets you create the two parts separately.

Cold fusion

ColdFusion is a complete development and deployment platform. Fast and scalable, the proven technology in ColdFusion drives tens of thousands of enterprise and e-commerce applications in leading companies worldwide.

ColdFusion uses a tag-based, server scripting language that is ideal for programming web applications. Processed entirely on the server, the ColdFusion Markup Language (CFML) cleanly integrates with HTML for user interface and XML for data exchange

PHP

PHP is an HTML-embedded scripting language. PHP is freely distributed, including the source code. PHP is a scripting language including all the basic features needed to create interactive www-pages. Since PHP is a scripting language, a PHP program might have a bit long response times.

Research:

Get into groups and find out the execution process of an ASP file, CGI script and a Java Servlet.