Darren Provine at Rowan University

Overview of Web Programming

The World Wide Web is composed of servers, clients, networks, protocols, programs, and data. Despite determined efforts to standardise the protocols (some well-intentioned and some not), there remains a wide variety of hardware and software operating at both the client and server levels, and most of the ones between.

This class focuses on the protocols and software currently in use, but tries to discuss them so that when they become obsolete (which they will), at least some of what's been covered will still be useful.

This class is not specifically about layout or graphical design issues, though they will be present in the background of most of what we do.

What I plan to cover, approximately in this order, is as follows:

• HTML, the standard language understood by web browsers and used to show things on the screen to the user visiting your page.
• CSS, which in some cases can greatly simplify management of web design and layout.
• HTTP, the protocol used by a web browser to request pages from a server, and used by a server to send the pages back.
• CGI and Perl, the most common way of producing a web page which has been specially generated for a given visitor.
• JavaScript, an often-useful way to allow the client's web browser to do some of the computing work necessary in completing a task. One needs to be careful using this, however, in that some web browsers do not support JavaScript, and features which require JavaScript have to be carefully chosen to ensure that pages will work on any browser.
• PHP, a system which allows web pages to include scripts which are executed by the web server, instead of by the client.
• MySQL, one of several database engines which manages information and simplifies the work of the web programmer.