Programming Languages

Websites are comprised of many assets beyond text and images.  We offer advanced understanding through our years of experience building rich Internet applications for our clients.  Below are brief description of acronyms you have probably heard many a time, but may have no idea what they mean.

HTML
Hypertext Markup Language, is the language of web pages. It provides a means to create structured documents by denoting structural semantics for text such as headings, paragraphs, lists etc as well as for links, quotes, and other items. It allows images and objects to be embedded and is written in the form of HTML elements consisting of "tags" surrounded by angle brackets within the web page content. It can include scripts in other languages such as Java Script, MySQL, ASP, Flash and more.

XHTML
Extensible Hypertext Markup Language is a family of XML markup languages that mirror or extend versions of Hypertext Markup Language (HTML).

XML
Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a set of rules for encoding documents electronically.  It is a textual data format and is widely used for the representation of arbitrary data structures.  There are many programming interfaces that software developers may use to access XML data, and several schema systems designed to aid in the definition of XML-based languages.  The most common practice for our clients be to gain exports of price and inventory data that can be uploaded to the website daily in an XML formatted document, which is a simple tab-delimited format.  As of 2009[update], hundreds of XML-based languages have been developed,[5] including RSS, Atom, SOAP, and XHTML. XML-based formats have become the default for most office-productivity tools, including Microsoft Office (Office Open XML), OpenOffice.org (OpenDocument), and Apple's iWork.

CSS
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) define the appearance and layout of text and other material. One CSS document can control font types, sizes, spacing, padding and other elements across the entire site, eliminating the need to call out such details on every html page.  This facilitates universal design changes and reduces code across the entire site, making it load faster and friendlier to Browsers and search Engines.

SHTML / STM / SHTM
This tag or script instructs a web page to display "Server Side Includes" (SSI) or contents of one or more files from a defined location.  Let's say you had a requirement to provide news on the home page that had to be updated regularly.  Instead of editing the web page, you could upload a text document that the script would pull the content from.

ASP / .NET
Active Server Pages (ASP) was Microsoft's first server-side script engine for dynamically-generated web pages pulling defined content from a database.  Most ASP pages are written in VBScript.  Being the first programming language for web design, it was the standard adopted by fortune 500 companies up through the 90's.  It has been surpassed by PHP as the most popular database programming language primarily to avoid operating on a Windows-Based system for typically faster run-times.

PHP / MySQL:
Like ASP, Hypertext Preprocessor (PHP) is a widely used, general-purpose scripting language  to produce dynamic web pages. PHP code is embedded into HTML source code document and interpreted by a web server with a PHP processor module, which generates the web page  document. PHP was originally created by Rasmus Lerdorf in 1995[1] and has been in continuous development ever since. PHP quickly outgrew it's main competitor in popularity,  By early 1997, PHP was the clearly most popular web-database programming language.  MySQL refers to the software that runs on a Linux Server to host the content that PHP call into action to appear on the web page.

Java
JavaScript enables interactive functions that are embedded directly HTML pages. Some simple examples of Java usage are:

  • Opening or popping up a new window with programmatic control over the size, position, and attributes of the new window (e.g. whether the menus, toolbars, etc. are visible).
  • Validation of web form input values to make sure that they will be accepted before they are submitted to the server.
  • Changing images as the mouse cursor moves over them: This effect is often used to draw the user's attention to important links displayed as graphical elements.

Because JavaScript runs directly from the web page and in a user's browser (rather than on a remote server) it responds to user actions quickly, making an application feel more responsive. Furthermore, JavaScript code can detect user actions which HTML alone cannot, such as individual keystrokes.

Flash
Flash is a multimedia  platform that is popular for adding animation and interactivity  to web pages. Flash is commonly used to create animation, advertisements, and to integrate video into web pages.  While Flash is attractive, it can hog a lot of memory and makes any content within the flash unreadable by search engines.  Content that needs to be indexed by search engines should not be embedded within flash.  For these reasons, it is common among professional web developers to use Java, and reserve Flash only as a last and final resort when nothing else can achieve the same desired effect.