Brian Neal van Ace's Hardware heeft een artikel geschreven over het bouwen van server parsed dynamische websites mbv van bijv. PHP, ASP of Cold Fusion:
As mentioned earlier, instructions may be passed not only to the client, but the webserver as well. The previous code segment is an example of one of the simplest form of server-parsed documents, known as server-side html, or SSI. Documents containing server-side html are typically stored with a ".shtml" extension, to allow the webserver to differentiate between files it should parse internally and files it should copy blindly to the client. Beyond server-side includes lie more complex and capable solutions, such as Active Server Pages (ASP), PHP, Cold Fusion, etc. Not only do these languages provide support includes and other obvious HTML aids, they are also full fledged languages. PHP, for example, is quite similar to both PERL and C++, while ASP is essentially Visual BASIC. Obviously, these web-based languages provide functionality that separates them from more general languages like C/C++. The real power to be gained from the use of these tools is when they are combined with databases, as we will see later on.
There are many different forms of server-side documents and programs. The most predominate are the ones mentioned above (ASP, PHP, CFM), though Common Gateway Interface (CGI), often used in conjunction with PERL, is additionally a common solution. However, there are some very important differences associated with CGI.
PHP is een redelijke simpele taal waarmee je eenvoudig en snel resultaat kunt bereiken (Tweakers.net draait op PHP en MySQL).
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