Web Development

In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee, a graduate of Oxford University, invented an internet-based hypermedia initiative for global information sharing, called the World Wide Web, marking the beginning of web development. Web development is a process of developing a web site for the Internet or a private network. Web development ranges from developing the simplest static single page of plain text to the most complex web-based internet applications. 
                       Among the web professionals, 'web development' usually refers to the main non-design aspects of building web sites i.e. writing markup and coding. Recently Web development has come to mean the creation of content management systems (CMS). These CMS can be made from scratch, proprietary or open source. CMS acts as middleware between the user and the database through the browser. CMS allows people to make changes to their Web site without having technical knowledge.
Web development mainly consists of the following two areas:
  1. Client Side Scripts: It refers to the set of programs that are executed at the client-side, using web browsers. This is an important part of DHTML concept i.e. to have different and changing contents based on user input. Client-side scripts are often embedded with in an HTML or XHTML document, but may also be contained in a separate file. On receiving a request from the client-side, the necessary files are sent to the user's computer by the web server. The scripts are executed by user’s web browser and display the document, including any visible output from the script. Client-side scripts also contain instructions for the browser to follow in response to certain user actions, like, clicking a button, typing a text..etc. Also, these instructions can be followed without further communication with the server as well.
  2. Server Side scripts: They are written in languages such as ASP.NET, PHP, Java, Perl, ColdFusion, Python, Ruby, Go, and server-side JavaScript. They are executed by the web server based on the request from the client side. The output is usually in HTML format understandable by a web browser and is then sent to the user's computer. The user does not have access to the script's source code, unless the author publishes the code separately, and may not even be aware that a script was executed. The documents produced by server-side scripts may contain client-side scripts as well.
Server-side needs to produce same output regardless of the user's browser. So, a language interpreter needs to be installed on the server. Client-side scripts do not require additional software; however, they do require that the user's web browser understands the scripting language in which they are written. Therefore, it is impractical to write scripts in a language that is not supported by popular web browsers.

  • HTML is standard markup language used to create web page. It is the language that describes the structure and the semantic content of a web document. HTML files are the source code for Web Browsers. A browser reads the HTML file and displays it using their tags.
  • JavaScript is a set of computer programs that manages the behavior of web pages.
  • CSS is to specify the layout of the web pages.
  • ASP.NET is a server-side Web application framework designed for Web development to produce dynamic Web pages, developed by Microsoft.










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