web development

There was a thread about the very same thing, abotu 1 week ago.
Use the search button, or just look in the last 20 pages or so.
Had a lot of talk on it, all that could be said about this matter was said there.

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Original post by Raduprv
There was a thread about the very same thing, abotu 1 week ago.
Use the search button, or just look in the last 20 pages or so.
Had a lot of talk on it, all that could be said about this matter was said there.

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Do you mean this thread?

Best language for e-commerce platform? (php, asp, asp.net)

The discussion in that thread is geared more toward enterprise development, and I am not building up on that scale. A friend of mine who knows nothing but email and Internet asked me if I could create a webpage for her research project. While I understand that this can be done even in HTML, she also mentioned CGI script. It looks like her websites must be done in CGI for some reason. CGI is not mentioned anywhere in that discussion. What happens to it? Has it become obsolete? I will see if I can persuade her to switch over to another language.

The last time I did web development and design is somewhere about 6 years ago where everything is still HTML. I relied heavily on tables when it comes to designing. Now everything has dramatically changed and I recall something called CSS for design, and languages such as PHP that controls the internal execution. Back then, web development is all written in HTML, from content to design. Nowadays it looks like a webpage is written in a combination of these languages. I am a little bit confused in which language does what. So can somebody explain it to me a little about the architecture of a webpage?

[edited by - alnite on June 9, 2004 4:57:07 AM]

Well CGI is just an interface for passing users request and data to Web server and back.
How you use this interface depends on which higher level language you want to use. Currently the most used ones are asp, php, perl, jsp, coldfusion and .net platform(which I believe is more suited for enterprise level applications). Coldfusion, asp and php are the most easy to work on and learn. Of these php is the only one which is available for free use. For asp you need IIS and visual studio(some might say they just need notepad for it) also from time to time you will need to look into msdn. Coldfusion well its quite expensive and I believe the easiest. I would suggest you go with php. Its syntax is C like but avoids all the difficult aspects of it plus there are number of forums where you can ask for help whenever you are stuck
Good luck
Saad

After a few different layouts, designs and backend setups, I decided to skip all that and use a web portal.

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Rob Loach | Rob Loach Online | Projects |

"The question is not how far; the question is do you possess the constitution, the depth of faith, to go as far as is needed." ~ The Boondock Saints

Still, read that thread, we deviated a few times from the original topic, and a few languages and database servers are discussed there, with all their strenghts and weaknesses.

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Original post by Raduprv
Still, read that thread, we deviated a few times from the original topic, and a few languages and database servers are discussed there, with all their strenghts and weaknesses.

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I did read that thread. And my problem is that I really know nothing about web development. Sure I can learn PHP and create a hello world website. But do I design my webpage entirely in PHP too? Or do I design it with HTML and CSS? But then what PHP is for?

And this is not an enterprise development and probably won''t need any database at all. I want to make it easy for her to update the website. I do all the programming, and let her make her own content. That way whenever she wants to change or update something, because she is the one doing the research and this is her website, she would only need to change a file (like a text file?) without touching the programming part.

If I created this in HTML (even with CSS), she would need to open the HTML files and locate the part she needed to change. She would also need to know HTML such as the br tag, bold, italic, etc. I don''t want that to happen.

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Well CGI is just an interface for passing users request and data to Web server and back.

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What do you mean by passing users request? Such as read topic #5?

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How you use this interface depends on which higher level language you want to use.

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So in order to use CGI I need a higher level language such as PHP and ASP.NET? So this is how it goes:

User request -> PHP -> CGI -> SQL -> CGI -> PHP -> User

?

Do I need HTML at all?

Think of PHP, CGI, ASP.NET as all ways of generating HTML. The end-user still needs to receive HTML to display in the web browser. PHP, CGI, and ASP.NET are all completely server-side things.

[edited by - mutex on June 9, 2004 5:49:33 PM]

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Original post by mutex
Think of PHP, CGI, ASP.NET as all ways of generating HTML. The end-user still needs to receive HTML to display in the web browser. PHP, CGI, and ASP.NET are all completely server-side things.

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I see. That''s why a server needs to support PHP/ASP/etc; and what it does is basically converting PHP/ASP code to HTML and pass it to the user.

That means I no longer need HTML.

Well, use HTML for static items, and HTML/PHP for dynamic.
HTML would work great on a Mission Statement page.
While HTML/PHP would be best for news.

/-09x2

[edited by - 09x2 on June 9, 2004 6:07:28 PM]

Well, the PHP still has to generate HTML. So you can''t just erase it from your memory. PHP doesn''t "convert" to HTML; it just spits out the HTML you want it to.

Anyway, PHP and MySQL rock. And CSS. All you need.

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Jesus saves ... the rest of you take damage.
"A page of history is worth a volume of logic." -- Oliver Wendell Holmes

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Original post by alnite


That means I no longer need HTML.

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I think how it works is:

Whatever-is-used-for-ouput "<b> Dancing monkey</b>"

[edited by - TravelingCoder on June 9, 2004 6:11:55 PM]

[edited by - TravelingCoder on June 9, 2004 6:12:31 PM]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but CGI is simply a program or script that outputs HTML, so I could have the following Python CGI script generate a web page:

print "Content-Type: text/html"
print
print "<html><body>hi</body></html>"

All the other server-side technologies mentioned are glorified versions of this. Eventually the HTML gets generated somewhere, and most of the time you're the one who's writing the print statements. ASP.NET seems to avoid a lot of this, but it's still possible to generate raw HTML directly.

[edited by - mutex on June 9, 2004 6:16:13 PM]

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Original post by 23yrold3yrold
Well, the PHP still has to generate HTML. So you can''t just erase it from your memory. PHP doesn''t "convert" to HTML; it just spits out the HTML you want it to.

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Not necesarly. You can embed the PHP inside the HTML code, and use PHP just to spit variables or texts.

maybe this would make more sense

test1.php

<?php
print "<html>";
print "<head><title>Hey</title></head>";
print "<body>";
print "Hey, this is a [b]PHP Script[/b]";
$add = 2 + 2;
print "2+2 = ".$add;
print "<body></html>";
?>

or this is just as good

test1.php

<html>
<head><title>Hey</title></head>
<body>
Hey, this is a [b]PHP Script[/b]
2+2 = <?php $add = 2 + 2; print $add; ?>
<body></html>

Basically, PHP (like most server-side CGI) is simply a means by which to generate dynamically HTML and access data on the server scope. It just does it in its own special way. Either way though, you still have to know HTML. And CSS are always a good thing.


[edited by - kryat on June 9, 2004 10:12:20 PM]

btw, asp is less of a language and more of a little bitty set of commands which you use in conjunction with a language

PHP and ASP are completely different beasts in every way. You should not compare the two. Also, there is no "CGI" language, CGI is a common gateway interface, you are most likely refering to perl when you''re talking about this, simply because perl uses a "cgi-bin".

I would suggest PHP with MySQL for your purposes.

MindEngine (C++) | E-Commerce Business Architecture (ASP.NET / C#)

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Original post by Raduprv

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Original post by 23yrold3yrold
Well, the PHP still has to generate HTML. So you can''t just erase it from your memory. PHP doesn''t "convert" to HTML; it just spits out the HTML you want it to.

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Not necesarly. You can embed the PHP inside the HTML code, and use PHP just to spit variables or texts.

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And thus you still need to know HTML. But I guess we established that by now ...

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Jesus saves ... the rest of you take damage.
"A page of history is worth a volume of logic." -- Oliver Wendell Holmes

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Original post by kryat
Basically, PHP (like most server-side CGI) is simply a means by which to generate dynamically HTML and access data on the server scope. It just does it in its own special way. Either way though, you still have to know HTML. And CSS are always a good thing.

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I see. PHP and friends are server-side languages which are used to communicate with the server (query data, etc). Does cgi-bin do the same job as PHP/ASP? What happens to it? It''s not even mentioned in the other thread.

cgi-bin is just a folder that most perl installations use as a place to hold all the perl files that are executable. Not too many people are really using perl anymore as a serverside language for their website.

MindEngine (C++) | E-Commerce Business Architecture (ASP.NET / C#)

the cgi-bin is like a throwback to the old days. Web servers would only set up one directory that would hold executable files. In other words, it was the place where you could store all the scripts that would use CGI (Common Gateway Interface) be they Perl, C, or whatever was available server-side.

It was a bin for your CGI... the CGI-BIN.

These days, a lot servers are configured to allow you to run scripts anywhere in your directory structure, so the need for a CGI-BIN has more or less gone the way of the dinosaur.