Best Web dev language

[Mike Meyer]

"Jon Slaughter" <Jon_Slaughter at Hotmail.com> writes:

> Also, can anyone recommend any book or web page that gives an introduction 
> to the method in which one programs web sites? I am not clear on who one, 
> for instance, would use C++ as the language for a web site except by using 
> it to create html... I'm not sure if basicaly all languages goal is creating 
> html dynamically or if there is more to do.  What I mean is that basicaly 
> one is using some other language to wrap the html code or possibly generate 
> it at run-time for dynamic results. (so all client based web interfaces are 
> really just html readers but all this "extra" stuff is used to make certain 
> things easier and dynamic(just as generating tables and forms and all that).

That's one way to look at it.

Personally, I prefer to think of HTML as the "UI toolkit" for web
development. It's more like CLI code that GUI code, in that you have
three distinct phases of "process, display, await response" rather
than waiting for UI events which trigger data processing and a display
update.

As such, you can use pretty much any language that can connect to the
toolkit. CGI is pretty low-level, and pretty much anything can be
used. C++ and Java both certainly get used. Others have mentioned LISP
variants. I've used the shell and Rexx. These days, I prefer Python,
but that's what you'd expect from somene reading c.l.python. Anything
you're comfortable with should work. In particular, since the user is
going to spend time waiting on network delays, any performance issues
the language implementation may have will be negligible for a single
user.

Someone mentioned that you might "require JavaScript on the client
side". I recommend against that - people and organizations disable
JavaScript for security reasons, and browsers on portable devices may
not have JavaScript at all. Why limit your audience? If you understand
HTML, it's possible to write a web page that uses JavaScript (or any
other such technology) for flashy effects, but still functions
properly if the user has disabled JavaScript, or doesn't have it
available. But that's a long discussion - see <URL:
http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/papers.green.html > for more
information.


       <mike
-- 
Mike Meyer <mwm at mired.org>			http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/
Independent WWW/Perforce/FreeBSD/Unix consultant, email for more information.