An Overview Of Important Web Programming Languages

Introduction

It all began with Tim Berners-Lee at CERN and the good old HTML. CERN, which is now mostly famous for its Large Hadron Collider, has recently gained major publicity by attracting the attention of frivolous news chasing the possibility of a black hole. I think even cooler than a black hole marking the end of humanity, is the virtual world that has largely impacted her evolution. The internet happened partly because of the outcome of CERN’s research and now we have a world beside the real world, functioning in parallel and becoming the flesh and blood of a terrestrial specy who was one day drawing on cave walls. HTML later became lingua franca of a world that was becoming bigger while making our real world smaller and smaller.

HTML is the basic language understood by all WWW (World Wide Web) clients. It can execute on a PC under any operating system such as Windows, Mac, Linux, or on a Unix workstation. However, it is limited in its computational power intentionally because it can prevent the execution of dangerous programs on the client machine. Web programmers, who are now much more sophisticated in their applications, provide different type of services to a growing demand of interactive content. Today, most users have competent client machines which are capable of doing much more than HTML allows. Fortunately, there is steady development in the field, and today the number of capable applications is expanding. We can easily build database-driven websites with various scripting languages such as PHP, ASP.NET, JSP, Perl, Cold Fusion and etc. This gives programmers a head ache. They generally fall into two main groups – proprietary and open-source, both have their own share of the market.

The languages mentioned below are all attempts to create the “ideal” Web programming language, which is usually done by extending and restricting existing languages. Web programming languages have a variety of ancestors: scripting languages, shell languages, mark-up languages and conventional programming languages. This document attempt to present a short introduction of the most important languages being used in Web today.

Characteristics Of Web Programming Languages

There is a diverse range of languages available and suitable for Web programming. There is no reason to believe that any one language will completely prevail and monopolize the Web programming scene. When you are developing a simple website, the question of which programming language and framework to choose can come up for things such as contact submission forms, photo galleries, jQuery Slider or any other dynamic content components that is generated by the web-server. When you are shopping for a web designer or web developer, you will hear them say “We program in PHP” or “We develop in ASP.NET/C#” and you might wonder what they are talking about and which one is better than the other.

As you can see, there is a fairly good selection of languages for web developers to choose to develop their web applications. There are many more languages available, some of them more specialized such as VRML, but discussing them is out of the scope of this article. Most developers have a working knowledge for at least a few of the frameworks, but tend to specialize in one.

New languages and language extensions are being developed to increase the usability of the Internet on a daily basis. Here we will look at some of the important languages that have shaped the Internet over the years and give a brief overview of each one of them.

ASP.NET – Active Server Pages

The.NET Framework is the infrastructure for the Microsoft.NET platform. It is an environment that can be used for building, deploying, and running Web applications and Web Services with easier and quicker programming.

ASP.NET runs inside IIS which comes free with Windows servers. It enables scripts to be executed by an Internet server. This web development technology is built into the.NET Framework and utilizes full featured programming languages such as C# or VB.NET to build web applications. I personally like C# very much and I think it is a great language to code with and extremely easy to use.

ASP.NET drastically reduces the amount of code required to build large applications. With built-in Windows authentication and pre-application configuration, security and safety are guaranteed. But the main disadvantage is that ASP.NET applications can only run on Windows platform.

PHP

As an open-source alternative, PHP is steadily developed by an active and very dedicated international community. This is a great example of strength in numbers. Another strength of PHP is of course its low costs. Since it is open-source software, PHP can be compiled and customized for any operating system. In fact, there are always pre-compiled versions available for your OS of choice. In an open, collaborative and non-hierarchical environment, suggested improvements can be adopted quickly. You can count on its fast paced updates and improvements more than other languages.

I think PHP is a good investment because it is not going to disappear anytime soon. It is used by a very large group of fantastic programmers who come out with amazing websites combining PHP with other technologies. Also it is a good idea that if you have invested in an online business and you have lost one of your precious programmers, it will be the easiest to find a replacement programmer.

Customer Incentive Marketing Programs

How do you fully implement an effective customer incentive program?

Executives who lead sales organizations, and for that matter, those reading this book, are not expected to have advanced knowledge of marketing strategies and social media. Nonetheless, those same executives should understand the principles of keeping your companies’ brand and products in the foreground of your customers. After all sales and marketing are one in the same, understand the correlation. We will explore straightforward concepts that will augment the efforts of the marketing department within your organization that are directly related building sales results. We will discuss programs that are directly related to the sales function and would be a compliment to the marketing division in your company.

Customer Incentive Programs – Airlines, car rental companies, credit card companies, and multiple other industries have proven that this is an effective way to influence customer purchasing habits. Incentive programs require a substantial investment for most organizations and they should be designed to provide significant return on investment to the organization. Incentive programs are widely used in private industry no matter how large or how small your company.

The key element to any customer incentive program is to properly design the program and features to the benefit of your company and the interests of the customer. These programs require the full participation of the benefactors as well as the employees in your organization, every single person involved in the program must be fully engaged in order to make the program a success.

It is highly recommended that you engage the services of a third party incentive-company. These firms will assist you in the development of the program details specifically suited to your business. In addition, these organizations have pre-printed merchandise catalogs, they have exclusive knowledge of resort properties, will administer the program tracking and will set up web-sites to enroll and track participant results.

These companies work on a commission base related to the travel itinerary and merchandise purchases. The investment in these incentive companies will provide a valuable resource to you and will enhance the overall customer experience and support the minute details of the program. Details to be considered when designing the program include:

What works for other companies does not guarantee success with your company; never emulate a competitors program, if one even exists.

Engage the service of a professional incentive company to assist in the administration.

Establish clearly defined rules and regulations and the rules should be easy to understand by the customer who will be participating in the program and easy to understand for the sales people who will be selling the program concept to the customer.

The rules defined into the program should always cover who will be eligible for the reward, especially if you are offering a travel incentive to a resort destination. Many times, companies will hand the reward to family members and the primary concept of a travel incentive program is to spend quality time with your core customers, not one of their relatives.

The program should be designed to promote the organizations strategic goals and product categories, make sure you consult other departments and thoroughly think about this objective to insure it is effective.

The A+ Programming Language

The programming world, is very vast, and you have to do a lot of research, in order for you to be able to grasp, any programming language in its entirety.

You will also find out very early, in your journey to becoming a great programmer, that there are many programming languages out here, which are necessary for you to learn; if of course you would like to be a great programmer and create that great application that you’ve always wanted to create.

In today’s article we are going to talk about the A+ programming language and all its important features.

A+ is said to be a descended of the A programming language, so if you know about the A programming language, you will have some type of idea of what A+ programming language, is really all about.

I don’t want us to get confused here, so I should mention that A+ is also a name used for an IT certification, which many individuals who would like to become a computer technician, pursue to further their careers.

The knowledge of the A+ certification, will definitely help you with your job, if you are a computer technician.

When you decide to obtain an A+ certification, you will be able to troubleshoot, maintain, customize, repair, install and help people with their computers.

You are going to be an awesome person, to many people when you are able to utilize your knowledge, to help them solve their computer problems, so that they are able to use their computers, to do their job.

However, in order for you to be able to get there, you do have to have, some type of valuable knowledge on your own about computers; in order for you to bring some real, sound contribution to someone’s life, by fixing their computer.

When you obtain an A+ certification, it will help you to be a valuable person to someone fast, you will also be on your way to be an awesome person to other people for real.

Anyhow we are here to speak about the programming side of A+ and that is what we are going to do.

First of all, A+ as we mentioned before is a descendent of the “A” programming language, it was created by Arthur Whitney in 1988 at Morgan Stanley.

The purpose of A+ was to provide its users, applications that are considered to be useful in the business world, because these same applications are developed in computational-intensive business environment.

In 1992 an A+ development group was formally created to upgrade and maintain this programming language.

The plus in the A+ programming language name, is referring to the electric graphical user interface, which means that you won’t have to just use a command prompt or a terminal, because there is a GUI that you can use to accomplish, the development your business applications, with A+ programming language.

The Benefits of Learning How to Program Computers

I still remember the excitement I felt when I wrote my first basic program on the BBC Micro at school. It was a simple four line program that drew a triangle on the screen. In the early 1980s we enjoyed playing games such as Chuckie Egg and the famous Granny’s Garden on the BBC Micro which was the first computer we were introduced to, but the real excitement was getting the computer to perform tasks in the basic programming language. Simple programs that drew shapes or printed text on the screen weren’t exactly ground-breaking but it was enough to wet my appetite for programming and set me on the path to programming games on other computers such as the Spectrum, Atari ST and Amiga.

In the good old days of the Spectrum you could buy magazines which feature pre-written games in basic code that you could type into your own Spectrum and hope the program ran okay. This was a great way of learning how code works and what commands do what. Books on basic programming were also released that would take you through the basics of commands and structure, and end up programming an entire game. The satisfaction of making things happen was amazing.

So what are the benefits of learning how to program computers? In my personal experience it gives you a sense of achievement to create an entire program from scratch and see it working. Working out how to get the computer to do something is challenging as you try to decide how you are going to do it. The excitement of being able to create your very own game where you make the rules. The joy of other people playing it.

Programming is good for the mind as it involves problem solving. For example: how to get multiple sprites moving across the screen and dropping bullets like the famous Space Invaders game. What to do if a player does something unexpected and the game crashes, how to tell the computer how to deal with these unexpected events. I once spent over a week programming a zoom function into an Art Package I wrote which gave me a great feeling of relief when I finally got it working.

Programming can also be lots of fun and a great hobby. I met some good friends when I was writing programming tutorials for various Atari ST diskzines in the 1990s who I still hear from to this day. We would send each other disks full of programming tools and routines and look forward to the many programs we could create where we were limited only by our imagination. Our creations were reviewed in the top Amiga and ST magazines of the day which is something we all looked forward to.

Finally programming can become a good source of income for you. Creating your own programs can become a reality with the many excellent programming languages available such as App Game Kit which allows you to create software that runs on multiple devices. People always want new software and employers need to find programmers to create it.

There are many game creator programs on the market which require no programming at all but I personally find them limiting. If you want to create your own games or application then I highly recommend you get stuck into some good old fashioned coding with one of the popular programming languages on the market today.