As a web developer every one must know the way web works and thus will be able to develop a better solution for the client. This post will give a basic insight to all web developers to understand the concepts behind each technology.
Basic things that is required for a web application is..
1) Web Pages
2) Client
3) Web Server
Let us inspect each entity to get a clear idea.
Webpages can be static or dynamic. Static web pages are the ones which will contain all the HTML markup hardcoded in the page and when requested server can directly serve the page to the client with out any processing. When it comes to Dynamic sites it is different.
As any web site can be opened in the compatible browser and browsers are just the rendering engines of the web pages served from server after a request we will not do any thing different in applications developed in different technolgies, thus we will not concentrate much on Client(Browser) in this blog post.
Web pages can be developed in any of the technologies like HTML, ASP.Net, JSP, PHP. Each uses different types of programming model and launguage is different from one to one but still the out put what we see in the client would be more or less same because the Parsers of the engines and modules which handles the requests will make a difference here. For ex: The ASP.Net control placed in the ASP.Net will be understood by ASP.Net parsing engine and accordingly parses the control to corresponding HTML with information and send it to the client. Similarly the PHP Isapi DLL and the Java engine works to render the HTML Content accordingly.
Many developers thinks that ASP.Net is completely different from java and PHP, In reality yes with respect to coding and background engine but with functionality and for end user it is same. All its needed to be understood is the engines rendering capability and CSS,Javascript. For Ex. If you look at the Treeview in ASP.Net and the way it rendered by Viewing source in browser, you will find a whole bunch of HTML,Javascript and Styles. So that Treeview what we place in Web Page when it comes back to browser it will be rendered as div’s, tables and other HTML Tags.
Examine the way a control in rendered in any technology and that’s it you will be able to develop applications in any of the web technology and also you will be able to leverage any web framework.
