Introduction to server side programming

When you want to introduce interactive features in your web pages, you can design programs that run either on the server side or the client side (i.e. on the users' computer).

In the last session we had a look at the client-side programming, but there were some restrictions with client-side programming languages, you cannot implement a database driven website using client-side programming languages and your code is visible to the user. As the database is on the server, so we need the server-side programming languages to do some processing on the server.

When you save a web page with an extension such as .php, .pl, .cgi, .cfm or .asp, however, look out. These extensions represent programming languages that can run programs on the server-side, creating HTML "on the fly".

The architecture of application development on the Internet

You gather the user requests in HTML form, in the web Browser, you implement client side validations, but you cannot store this data, so you need to send it across to the server for processing, the web server processes your request, stores the data in the database and sends back the HTML to your browser, confirming that the data has been saved. Now your data is stored on the server, if you want to retrieve this data from the server, you need to write a SQL query, which you write on the Server-side. Now if you want to give restricted access to the user to this data, you need to implement user name, password functionality. This can be implemented using client-side programming, but the user can look into your code and see what the correct username & password are, so this is not the correct technique to implement this functionality. The correct way to do this is using server-side programming language. So when the user enters the username and password, that data is sent to the server and then the server-side program validates it and sends back the appropriate information.

Research:

Logon to the University website and find which server side technology does it use?