Web Development Zone

XML

2006-09-16T07:05:00.000-07:00

The Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a W3C-recommended general-purpose markup language for creating special-purpose markup languages, capable of describing many different kinds of data. In other words, XML is a way of describing data. An XML file can contain the data too, as in a database. It is a simplified subset of Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML). Its primary purpose is to facilitate the sharing of data across different systems, particularly systems connected via the Internet. Languages based on XML (for example, Geography Markup Language (GML), RDF/XML, RSS, Atom, MathML, XHTML, SVG, XUL, EAD, Klip and MusicXML) are defined in a formal way, allowing programs to modify and validate documents in these languages without prior knowledge of their particular form.

The versatility of SGML for dynamic information display was understood by early digital media publishers in the late 1980s prior to the rise of the internet.[1] [2] By the mid-1990s some practitioners of SGML had gained experience with the then-new World Wide Web, and believed that SGML offered solutions to some of the problems the Web was likely to face as it grew. Dan Connolly added SGML to the list of W3C's activities when he joined the staff in 1995; work began in mid-1996 when Jon Bosak developed a charter and recruited collaborators. Bosak was well-connected in the small community of people who had experience both in SGML and the Web. He received support in his efforts from Microsoft.

XML was designed by an eleven-member working group, supported by an (approximately) 150-member Interest Group. Technical debate took place on the Interest Group mailing list and issues were resolved by consensus or, when that failed, majority vote of the Working Group. The decision record was compiled by Michael Sperberg-McQueen 4 December 1997. James Clark served as Technical Lead of the Working Group, notably contributing the empty-element "" syntax and the name "XML". Other names that had been put forward for consideration included "MAGMA" (Minimal Architecture for Generalized Markup Applications), "SLIM" (Structured Language for Internet Markup) and "MGML" (Minimal Generalized Markup Language). The co-editors of the specification were originally Tim Bray and Michael Sperberg-McQueen. Halfway through the project Bray accepted a consulting engagement with Netscape, provoking vociferous protests from Microsoft. Bray was temporarily asked to resign the editorship. This led to intense dispute in the Working Group, eventually solved by the appointment of Microsoft's Jean Paoli as a third co-editor.

XML provides a text-based means to describe and apply a tree-based structure to information. At its base level, all information manifests as text, interspersed with markup that indicates the information's separation into a hierarchy of character data, container-like elements, and attributes of those elements. In this respect, it is similar to the LISP programming language's S-expressions, which describe tree structures wherein each node may have its own property list.

The fundamental unit in XML is the character, as defined by the Universal Character Set. Characters are combined to form an XML document. The document consists of one or more entities, each of which is typically some portion of the document's characters, stored in a text file.

XML files may be served with a variety of Media types. RFC3023 defines the types "application/xml" and "text/xml", which say only that the data is in XML, and nothing about its semantics. The use of "text/xml" has been criticized as a potential source of encoding problems. RFC3023 also recommends that XML-based languages be given media types beginning in "application/" and ending in "+xml"; for example "application/atom+xml" for Atom. This page discusses further XML and MIME.

The ubiquity of text file authoring software (basic text editors such as Notepad and TextEdit as well as word processors) facilitates rapid XML document authoring and maintenance, whereas prior to the advent of XML, there were very few data description languages that were general-purpose, Internet protocol-friendly, and very easy to learn and author. In fact, most data interchange formats were proprietary, special-purpose, "binary" formats (based foremost on bit sequences rather than characters) that could not be easily shared by different software applications or across different computing platforms, much less authored and maintained in common text editors.

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HTML & DHTML

2006-09-16T06:42:00.000-07:00

HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is a predominant markup language for the creation of web pages. It provides a means to describe the structure of text-based information in a document — by denoting certain text as headings, paragraphs, lists, and so on — and to supplement that text with interactive forms, embedded images, and other objects. HTML can also describe, to some degree, the appearance and semantics of a document, and can provide additional cues, such as embedded scripting language code, that can affect the behavior of web browsers and other HTML processors.

HTML is defined in formal specifications that were developed and published throughout the 1990s, inspired by Tim Berners-Lee's prior proposals to graft hypertext capability onto a homegrown SGML-like markup language for the Internet. The first published specification for a language called HTML was drafted by Berners-Lee with Dan Connolly, and was published in 1993 by the IETF as a formal "application" of SGML (with an SGML Document Type Definition defining the grammar).

HTML markup consists of several types of entities, including: elements, attributes, data types and character references.

Dynamic HTML or DHTML is a term used for a collection of technologies, used together to create interactive and animated web sites by using a combination of static markup language (such as HTML), a client-side scripting language (such as JavaScript), the presentation definition language (e.g. Cascading Style Sheets [CSS]), and the Document Object Model. The term has fallen out of use in recent years, as DHTML scripts often tended to not work well cross platform. Newer techniques, including Ajax and unobtrusive JavaScript coding, have led to similar results, but in an accessible, standards-compliant way.

Some disadvantages of DHTML are that it is difficult to develop and debug due to varying degrees of support among web browsers of the aforementioned technologies and that the variety of screen sizes means the end look can only be fine-tuned on a limited number of browser and screen-size combinations. Development for recent browsers, such as Internet Explorer 5.0+, Netscape 6.0+, and Opera 7.0+, is aided by a shared Document Object Model.

Dynamic HTML is also often used to make rollover or drop-down buttons on a web page. DHTML is a combination of JavaScript, CSS, HTML, and sometimes Ajax.

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Javascript

2006-09-16T06:21:00.000-07:00

JavaScript is the name of Netscape Communications Corporation's implementation of ECMAScript, a scripting programming language based on the concept of prototypes. The language is best known for its use in websites, but is also used to enable scripting access to objects embedded in other applications.

Despite the name, JavaScript is only distantly related to the Java programming language, the main similarity being their common debt to the C programming language syntax. Semantically, JavaScript has far more in common with the Self programming language and ActionScript which is also an ECMAScript.

JavaScript is a registered trademark of Sun Microsystems, Inc., used under license for technology invented and implemented by Netscape

JavaScript was originally developed by Brendan Eich of Netscape Communications Corporation under the name Mocha, then LiveScript, and finally renamed to JavaScript. The change of name from LiveScript to JavaScript roughly coincided with Netscape adding support for Java technology in its Netscape Navigator web browser. JavaScript was first introduced and deployed in the Netscape browser version 2.0B3 in December of 1995. When web developers talk about using JavaScript in Internet Explorer, they are actually using JScript. The choice of name proved to be a source of much confusion.

As of 2006, the latest version of the language is JavaScript 1.7. The previous version 1.6 corresponded to ECMA-262 Edition 3 like JavaScript 1.5, except for Array extras, and Array and String generics. ECMAScript, in simple terms, is a standardized version of JavaScript. The ECMA-357 standard specifies E4X, a language extension dealing with XML.

JavaScript is a prototype-based scripting language with a syntax loosely based on C. Like C, the language has no input or output constructs of its own. Where C relies on standard I/O libraries, a JavaScript engine relies on a host environment into which it is embedded. There are many such host environment applications, of which web technologies are the best-known examples. These are examined first.One major use of web-based JavaScript is to write functions that are embedded in or included from HTML pages and interact with the Document Object Model (DOM) of the page to perform tasks not possible in HTML alone.

avaScript debugging has some specifics in comparison with stand-alone applications. JavaScript programs usually rely on interaction with the loaded page's Document Object Model (DOM) so errors may be caused by wrong DOM usage in a technically correct script. This makes JavaScript errors difficult to find. However nowadays both Internet Explorer and the Gecko-based browsers come with a reasonably good JavaScript debugger. Gecko browsers use the Venkman debugger or the FireBug debugger for Mozilla Firefox, while for Internet Explorer there is the Microsoft Script Debugger. Microsoft also provides Microsoft Script Editor (MSE) as part of their Microsoft Office package (Microsoft Office 2002 or higher). There are also some free online checking tools such as JSLint

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PHP

2006-09-16T06:01:00.000-07:00

PHP (PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor) is an open source, reflective programming language. Originally designed as a high level scripting language for producing dynamic Web pages, PHP is used mainly in server-side application software but can be executed from a command line interface or a stand alone GUI.

PHP generally runs on a web server, taking PHP code as its input and creating Web pages as output, but command-line scripting and client-side GUI applications are part of the three primary uses of PHP as well.

PHP competes with Visual Basic and C++ as the third most popular programming language behind Java and C, based on world wide availability of practitioners, courses and vendors

PHP was written as a set of CGI binaries in the C programming language by the Danish-Canadian programmer Rasmus Lerdorf in 1994, to replace a small set of Perl scripts he had been using to maintain his personal homepage.[2] Lerdorf initially created PHP to display his résumé and to collect certain data, such as how much traffic his page was receiving. "Personal Home Page Tools" was publicly released on June 8, 1995 after Lerdorf combined it with his own Form Interpreter to create PHP/FI.[3]
PHP 3

Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans, two Israeli developers at the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, rewrote the parser in 1997 and formed the base of PHP 3, changing the language's name to the recursive initialism "PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor". The development team officially released PHP/FI 2 in November 1997 after months of beta testing. Public testing of PHP 3 began immediately and the official launch came in June 1998. Suraski and Gutmans then started a new rewrite of PHP's core, producing the Zend engine in 1999.[4] They also founded Zend Technologies in Ramat Gan, Israel, which is actively involved with PHP development.

PHP 4

In May 2000, PHP 4, powered by the Zend Engine 1.0, was released. The latest version as of September 2006 is 4.4.4. PHP 4 is currently still supported by security updates.

Server-side scripting

Originally designed to create dynamic web pages, server-side scripting is the principal focus for PHP. While running the PHP parser with a web server and web browser, the PHP model can be compared to other server-side scripting languages such as Microsoft's ASP.NET system, Adobe ColdFusion, Sun Microsystems' JavaServer Pages, Zope, mod_perl and the Ruby on Rails framework, as they all provide dynamic content to the client from a web server. To more directly compete with the "framework" approach taken by these systems, Zend is working on the Zend Framework - an emerging (as of June 2006) set of PHP building blocks and best practices; other PHP frameworks along the same lines include CakePHP and Symfony.

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ASP

2006-09-16T05:49:00.000-07:00

Active Server Pages (ASP) is Microsoft's server-side technology for dynamically-generated web pages that is marketed as an add-on to Internet Information Services (IIS).

Programming ASP websites is made easier by various built-in objects. Each object corresponds to a group of frequently-used functionality useful for creating dynamic web pages. In ASP 2.0 there are six such built-in objects: Application, ASPError, Request, Response, Server, and Session. Session, for example, is a cookie-based session object that maintains variables from page to page. Application Center Test is also available for load testing.

Most ASP pages are written in VBScript, but any other Active Scripting engine can be selected instead by using the @Language directive . JScript (Microsoft's implementation of ECMAScript) is the other language that is usually available. PerlScript (a derivative of Perl) and others are available as third-party installable Active Scripting engines.

ASP technology before support for the .NET framework is sometimes referred to as "Classic ASP".

The move from ASP 3.0 to ASP.NET was a significant change. ASP.NET introduced the ability to replace in-HTML scripting with full-fledged support for .NET languages such as Visual Basic .NET and C#. In-page scripting can still be used (and is fully supported), but now pages can use VB.NET and C# classes to generate pages instead of code in HTML pages.

There are solutions to run "Classic ASP" sites as standalone applications. One of them is ASPexplore - a software package that runs Microsoft Active Server Pages off-line, without any web server. ASPexplore provides solutions to create fully-fledged ASP-based Windows applications and their setups.

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Web Main

2006-09-16T03:07:00.000-07:00

In this zone, you will find the Ebooks of Web Development Tools and Languages such as XML, PHP and Javascript. This section is purely dedicated towards providing Latest Ebooks on the various aspects of the websites development. Also, Please post your request in Suggestion/Comments/Request Box so that we can post the material requested by you as soon as possible so that this section can serve you in better manner.

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