FLASH

Over the releases of new versions of Flash, Macromedia has made Flash more and more controllable via programming, where they have it positioned as a competitor to HTML to build interactive web sites and applications such as an e-commerce store. Macromedia argues that Flash is the way to go instead of HTML because of the following reasons:

• Flash movies load faster and save on download time because Flash is vector based whereas HTML is not.
• Flash intelligently ‘caches’ it’s movies so they don’t have to be reloaded.
• Flash gives the user (the person viewing/using the Flash movie) a more responsive ‘rich-client’ like experience.

All of these points are true, but they can be true for HTML pages as well (except for the vectors). I will address these points now:
Flash pages can be made to load faster, but most of the time, the way they are designed in the real world, they do not. That is not a Flash problem, it is more an issue of the Flash developers going nuts with fancy and heavy Flash movies.

HTML caches pages as well, once images are downloaded they are held in your browser’s cache. The cached images are then used instead of downloading them from the server again. With new technology like ASP.net and Java Server Faces, HTML now can react just like a ‘rich-client’ application. Even without these new tools, properly designed HTML for most dynamic sites can provide a good user experience.

PHP

PHP is one of the most popular server side scripting languages running today. It is used for creating dynamic web pages that interact with the user offering customized information. PHP offers many advantages; it is fast, stable, secure, easy to use and open source.PHP code is inserted directly into the HTML that makes up a website. When a visitor comes to the website, the code is executed.Because PHP is a server side technology, the user does not need any special browser or plug-ins to see the PHP in action.The beauty of PHP lies in its simplicity. It is easy to understand and learn, especially for those with backgrounds in programming such as C, java script and HTML. The language is similar to C and Perl so that anyone with a background in either C or Perl programming will feel comfortable using and understanding PHP.PHP also runs on just about every platform including most UNIX, Macs and Windows version.

XML

XML stands for Extensible Markup Language. XML is a flexible way to create common information formats and share both the format and the data on the World Wide Web. XML is a standard, simple, self-describing way of encoding both text and data so that content can be processed with relatively little human intervention and exchanged across diverse hardware, operating systems, and applications. XML can be used by any individual or companies that want to share information in a consistent way. XML describes the content in terms of what data is being described. For example, the word “department” placed within markup tags could indicate that the data that followed was a department details. This means that an XML file can be processed purely as data by a program or it can be stored with similar data on another computer. For example, depending on how the application in the receiving computer wanted to handle the department details, it could be stored, or displayed. XML tags can be defined by individuals or organizations for some specific application, whereas the HTML standard tag set is defined by the World Wide Web Consortium.

Advantages of XML:

• It is a platform independent language.
• It is as easy as HTML.
• XML is fully compatible with applications like JAVA, and it can be combined with any application which is capable of processing XML.
• XML is an extremely portable language to th e amount that it can be used on large network s with multiple platforms like the internet, and it can be used on handhelds or PDAs.
• XML allows you to create your own tags, or use the tags which have already been created.
• It can be deployed on any network if it is amicable for usage with the application in use.
• If the application can work along with XML, then XML can work on any platform and has no boundaries.

JSP

JSP stands for Java Server Pages. JSP technology provides a simplified, fast way to create dynamic web content. JSP technology enables rapid development of web-based applications that are server and platform independent. Java Server Pages are an extension to the Java servlet technology that was developed by Sun.JSPs have dynamic scripting capability that works in tandem with HTML code, helps in separating the page logic from the static elements. JSPs are fully interoperable with servlets. You can include output from a servlet or forward the output to a servlet, and a servlet can include output from a JSP or forward output to a JSP.If you use a web container such as Tomcat 5.x, which supports Servlet API 2.4 and JSP 2.0, then you can use a number of useful new features of JSP.

• Using a servlet as a welcome file.
• Mapping filters to Request Dispatchers.
• The new Servlet Request Listener and Servlet Request Attribute Listener interfaces.
• Using Expression Language (EL) code within template text, not just as tag attribute values.
• Writing tag files.
• Writing Expression Language qualified functions.

PERL

Perl is a dynamic programming language, created in 1987 by Larry Wall. It was developed as a scripting language, meant to combine the best features of C and other programming languages. Perl is a programming language which can be used for a large variety of tasks. A simple use of Perl would be for extracting information from a text file and printing out a report or for converting a text file into another form. Apart Perl provides a large number of tools for quite complicated problems, including systems programming. Perl programs are called as Perl scripts. The Perl program refers to the system program named Perl for executing Perl scripts. Perl was ideal for server-side scripting for web pages, and so it grows its popularity in that field, eventually becoming one of the top server-side programming languages.

Some of the Perl Properties:

• Object Oriented
• Cross platform
• Interpreted Language
• Rich set of libraries
• Popular for web pages
• Extremely popular for bioinformatics

HTML

HTML stands for Hyper Text Markup Language. HTML is not a programming language, it is a markup language. A markup language is a set of markup tags. HTML uses markup tags to describe web pages. It uses different types of tags of design the web pages. The tags in HTML are container tags and empty elements. HTML allows you to insert the java script / CSS to give your page a good appearance. The user creates tags that start and finish with angle brackets. To end the formatting or change to another format, the HTML developer types the first angle bracket, a backslash, then repeats the command and closes the bracket. For example,is the code used to create the heading at the top of this article. HTML provides us with the tags like to format the text.

HTML is a formal Recommendation by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and is generally adhered to by the major browsers, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Netscape’s Navigator, which also provide some additional non-standard codes. The current version of HTML is HTML 4.0. Both Internet Explorer and Netscape employ some features differently and provide non-standard extensions. Web developers using the more advanced features of HTML 4 may have to design pages for both browsers and send out the appropriate version to a user

FLEX

Flex is a very powerful and versatile expert systems toolkit. In contrast to simple expert system shells, Flex offers an open-ended knowledge-based solution to business problems.Flex is implemented in Prolog, a high-level rules-based language, and has unlimited access to the power of that underlying technology.The success or failure of a software development platform depends to a large extent on the unique features it offers. Flex is a wonderful platform evolving to greater heights each time a new version is created.

Flex employs a ‘Natural Language’ style approach to defining knowledge through the provision of a dedicated Knowledge Specification Language(KSL).Flex provides an interactive question and answer mechanism, which can be configured and extended by the developer without limit. Again, the underlying Prolog offers various high-level features for extending the User Interface.