The Evolution of Web Applications In the beginning,
The Evolution of Web Applications In the beginning, web applications were just a collection of static HyperText Markup Language (HTML) pages. Earlier versions of HTML allowed web developers to use text, some formatting tags, images, and a few widgets in their pages. The first sites and applications concentrated more on presentation aspects. This quickly became a problem since HTML was created to be a data modeling language and not a true presentation vehicle: it was meant to describe the structure of a document by separating data from metadata (head/body) leaving the browser to render the page. Programmers then added a bit of logic to their applications mainly to do some form processing and user tracking. The first functions were simply bolted to the old view-only applications. Common Gateway Interface (CGI) scripts, usually written in Perl, were the main tools to add logic to a web site. Later on, plenty of new programming alternatives emerged ColdFusion, mod_perl, Python, ASP, JSP, and PHP. Dynamic web applications added more complexity to the logic of a web application, since the scripts have to access, pull, transform, and format the data: Technology Advantages Disadvantages PHP Executed as a web-server Some compatibility issues module, PHP runs really when ported to fast. Lots of extensions non-Apache web servers and ad-hoc functions or platforms mainly greatly reduce regarding specific development time. extensions. CGI programming Allows us to develop It’s an old-fashioned way dynamic pages using a of programming and the very wide range of slowest alternative for the programming languages development of web (Perl, C, Python, Lisp to pages. name a few). mod_perl Runs the Perl interpreter Not portable to other web as an Apache module. servers. Provides the performance of PHP. mod_python Runs Python as an Not portable to other web Apache module. Provides servers. better performance than CGI programming. Java Servlets Very high portability. All The disadvantages of Java the Java features can be are adopted too (slow used. performance, higher development time). FastCGI A modern approach to CGI Not very popular, not very scripting. Increases portable. performance and allows us to program in a wide range of programming languages. ASP Short development time Not portable. Proprietary and acceptable language. performance. As developers thought of ways to store and manage data, they encountered the principle of a content Page 527
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