Specifications

2.11 Scripting Languages

2.11.1 PHP

PHP is a widely used, general-purpose scripting language. It was originally

designed for web development to produce dynamic web pages. To accomplish

this, PHP code is embedded into the HTML source document and interpreted by

a web server with a PHP processor module, which then would generate the web

content. The code is executed at runtime to generate the dynamic information.

The primary use of PHP now focuses on server-side scripting, and is similar to

other scripting languages that provide dynamic content from a web server to a

client, such as Microsoft‟s Active Server Pages and Sun Microsystems‟

JavaServer Pages. It has also become popular for the development of

frameworks that act as building blocks and a design structure to promote rapid

application development. As of April 2007, over 20 million Internet domains had

web services hosted on servers with PHP installed.

2.11.2 CGI

Common Gateway Interface is a standard that defines how web server software

can delegate the generation of web pages to a text-based application. These

applications are known as CGI scripts and can be written in any programming

language. This allows the clients to have an interface with the web server.

2.11.3 JavaScript

Javascript is an implementation of the ECMA Script language standard and is

typically used to enable programmatic access to computational objects within a

host environment. The language was invented by Brendan Eich at Netscape and

first appeared in Netscape Navigator 2.0. It was first adapted by Microsoft‟s

Internet Explorer 3.0. Since the third edition of the EMCA Script standard, EMCA

Script has become the programming language supported by essentially all web

browsers.

2.11.4 HTML

Hypertext Markup Language, or HTML, is the predominant markup language for

web pages. It provides a means to create structured documents by denoting

structural semantics for text such as headings, paragraphs, lists, links, quotes

and other items. Images and objects can be embedded and can create

interactive forms. Nearly all of the HTML documents on the World Wide Web are

delivered from Web servers to web browsers using HTTP.