Monday, October 12, 2009

ASP, JSP, PHP, COLD FUSION, RUBY ON RAILS etc

What do all these acronyms mean?
And does your site need them?

Here's a quick list to help you communicate with your web team:

ASP = Active Server Pages
Also known as Classic ASP or ASP Classic, was Microsoft's first server-side script engine for dynamically-generated web pages.

CFML = Cold Fusion Mark up Language
The pages in a ColdFusion application include the server-side CFML tags in addition to HTML (XHTML) tags. When a browser requests a page in a ColdFusion application, it is automatically pre-processed by the ColdFusion Application Server.

CSS = Cascading Style Sheets
A style sheet language used to describe the presentation semantics (that is, the look and formatting) of a document written in a markup language.

HTML = Hyper Text Markup Language
the predominant markup language for 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 can be used to create interactive forms. It is written in the form of HTML elements consisting of "tags" surrounded by angle brackets within the web page content.

JS or JScript = Javascript
An object-oriented scripting language used to enable programmatic access to objects within both the client application and other applications. It is primarily used in the form of client-side JavaScript, implemented as an integrated component of the web browser, allowing the development of enhanced user interfaces and dynamic websites.

JSP = JavaServer Pages
A server side Java technology that allows software developers to create dynamically generated web pages, with HTML, XML, or other document types, in response to a Web client request to a Java Web Application container (server).

PHP = Hypertext Preprocessor
Is a widely used, general-purpose scripting language that was originally designed for web development, to produce dynamic web pages. It can be embedded into HTML and generally runs on a web server, which needs to be configured to process PHP code and create web page content from it.

Rails or RoR = Ruby on Rails
An open source web application framework for the Ruby programming language. It is intended to be used with an Agile development methodology which is used by web developers for rapid development.

XML = Extensible Markup Language
As of 2009, hundreds of XML-based languages have been developed,[3] including RSS, Atom, SOAP, and XHTML. XML has become the default file format for most office-productivity tools, including Microsoft Office, OpenOffice.org, and Apple's iWork.

There are many more! Google and Wikipedia are great resources for learning what the web terms mean. If you have any questions or want to discuss what might work on your website, please feel free to email me anytime!