[Klug-general] Interactive Websites

[Allen Brooker]

Peter Childs wrote:
> Right Second post in ten minutes, its been rather quite so I thought
> this place needed some livening up. Unless your all positing on the
> wiki now and I can't be be bothered to look, I have wiki and forums..
> and that comes from someone using gmail......
> 
> I need to create a interactive web site, Rather not give details its
> for work. Basically we have a large C++ Qt application and and want to
> transfer it or enhance it with an interactive website.
> 
> Anyway I'm trying to work out what tools to use because I'm getting a 
> bit lost.
> 
> I mean the web just has too many bits.
> 
> Php/Perl/Java/SSI (Pick one)
> Html
> Javascript (with all its ie/firefox/opera differences)
> CSS (Yes thats a 4th complely different language)
> AJAX (Which is really more of an idea than a langauge)
> GWT (Oh that encapsulates most of the above into java)
> JPEG
> PNG
> GIF
> ActiveX
> Flash
> 
> Are you confused yet?
> 
> I want to know where to start what to use.
> 
> I've been looking at Dojo/Php/HTML/CSS but thats still 4 complete
> different langaues to learn which does not help. And I'm a programmer
> not a designer so I should be able to cope. But I don't know how a
> Designer with no programming skills would cope with the web currently.
> 
> Please bring back the paper and pencil at least then you only had to
> chouse between type of pen/pencil and type of paper....
> 
> Peter.
Hi Peter,

You're going to need to use a number of different "languages" whatever 
you do as each one serves a different purpose.

HTML - This is a document markup language. It allows you to give 
structure to what would otherwise be a plain text document.

CSS - This is a style markup language. It allows you to determine how a 
document should look on different mediums (in this case, notably the 
screen and possibly print - there's also stuff going on for other 
mediums such as speech at the moment. I'm not sure what stage they're at).

JavaScript - This is a client-side scripting language that allows you to 
do programmed actions on the client side. This tends to give a snappier 
response than server side scripting, but at the cost of security (JS can 
be interfered with / results changed before sending to server) and 
reliability (JS may be disabled or features not implemented on the given 
platform).

PHP / Python / Perl / whatever - These are server-side scripting 
languages that allow you to do programmed actions on the server. 
Personally I recommend PHP because it's easy to pick up and is well 
documented.

Java / ActiveX - I wouldn't worry about these. Nobody really uses Java 
stuff on the web these days (except maybe JSP on the server side - but 
uptake is still very low compared to PHP). ActiveX is platform specific 
and there's lots of issues revolving around security and permissions.

Flash - Don't get me started. Just stay away =P

JPEG / PNG / GIF - These are different image formats, each ideal for 
different types of images (is it a photo, does it have large blocks of 
colour, etc).

Hope that helps

Allen