Web Terms Explained - Part 3

In part one of this article I described some of the different features available in web hosting packages. As promised this article will talk about the different programming languages offered by web hosting packages

Now there are many different programming languages which allow you to manipulate data and make dynamic pages. The most common are PHP, ASP and CGI. If you're not likely to use any of these languages you will just need the very basic hosting package. Those that do will know what language they need enable on there hosting package. If you are not sure because you have a web development company building your site, you need to talk to them about it. Some of the common programming language terms are explained below:

PHP is a very powerful programming language which is the abbreviation of Hypertext Preprocessor. At university it was also known to me as 'pretty hard programming!' Basically is a server side scripting language which can be embedded into HTML. Server side means that the code will only work on a server that has PHP enabled. So you can't test your code on your local machine, only on a server.

ASP stands for 'active server pages' which provides a way to embed scripts in HTML pages in order to generate dynamic pages like processing forms or showing the time and date. Some web hosting companies will offer you the choice of running a website on a Unix or Windows server. If you want to use ASP then you will need to have a Windows server as Unix does not support it.

CGI stands for 'Common Gateway Interface' which when offered by a webhost means you can run CGI scripts. These scripts are normally written in perl and offer many kinds of functionality to your website. A lot of scripts are freely available to use although you can obviously create your own.

FrontPage extensions are special extensions which are installed on the server which enhance the usability of a WYSIWYG program known as FrontPage editor. A WYSIWYW program stands for 'what you see is what you get' which describes a system which displays your content similar to how it will look once published. So rather than view html code which is like a foreign language to those that don't know it, it will show images and text just like a webpage does. This makes building webpage's a lot easier for novices. If you have used FrontPage to build your website you should find a webhosting company that supports FrontPage extensions.

JavaScript is a simple client-side programming language. JavaScript can be embedded in HTML pages to create interactive effects and do tasks like validate form data. All popular modern browsers support JavaScript.

SSI stands for 'Server Side Includes' which is a method of using directives in your HTML code to be processed by the web server. SSI is a standard in basic web hosting packages.

Most web hosting companies offer some or all of the above. If you just want a static website you will not need any of these languages. But remember you will need a domain name and web hosting including an FTP software program so you can transfer your files to your server space.