Taking Advantage of the Server - Web Publishing with HTML and CSS - page 647

Microsoft ASP.NET
Microsoft provides the ASP.NET environment for writing web applications that run on
Windows servers. ASP.NET is similar to PHP in that it supports embedding server-side
code in HTML pages. It supports Visual Basic and C# as programming languages and
runs on Microsoft's Internet Information Server, which is included with Windows Server.
You can read more about ASP.NET and download free tools for developing and running
ASP.NET applications at http://www.asp.net/.

Java EE
Java is a programming language originally created by Sun that runs on many operating
systems, including Windows, OS X, and Linux. EE stands for Enterprise Edition, an
umbrella under which the server-side Java technologies live. Java is widely used by large
companies to build internal and external applications.

There are two ways to write web applications in Java—servlets, which are programs that
run on the server and can produce web content as output; and Java Server Pages, which
allow you to embed Java code in HTML pages so that it can be executed on the server.
You can read more about it at http://java.sun.com/javaee/.

Ruby on Rails
Ruby on Rails is a newer application platform that is gaining popularity because it
enables developers to get a lot done with just a few lines of code. It uses the Ruby pro-
gramming language and is designed with the philosophy that applications can be written
quite efficiently if developers adhere to the conventions that the creators of the Ruby on
Rails framework built in to it. You can read more about it at http://rubyonrails.org.

Summary
This lesson provided a whirlwind tour of the PHP language, and it explained how server-
side scripts are written in general. Although the syntax of other languages will differ
from PHP, the basic principles for dealing with user input, processing forms, and embed-
ding scripts in your pages will be quite similar. I also listed some other application plat-
forms you might encounter. They are all similar to PHP in function, even though the
syntax of the languages they use differ from PHP to varying degrees.

21

In the next lesson, you learn how to take advantage of applications that other people have
written rather than writing them yourself. Just as PHP has lots of built-in functions to
take care of common tasks, so too are there many popular applications that you can
download and install rather than writing them from scratch yourself.