Creating Dynamic Web Pages

A person who is developing new content, creating or modifying an HTML document, or uploading typically updates a Web page. This process can also happen dynamically when code is written that connects to a database and inserts the information into the HTML document. Applications for generating dynamic Web pages include e-commerce sites, customizable sites, and data entry and retrieval systems that run over the Internet. Different software, hardware, and infrastructure companies use different solutions for building dynamic Web content. Some solutions include the following:

Active Server Pages (ASPs) are Microsoft's version of dynamic Web page generation. VBScript is the default scripting language used in ASPs. The following is required:

1. Windows server running Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) 5.1 or higher
2. Sun Solaris or IBM AIX server running Chili!Soft ASP

IIS 5.1 was shipped with Windows XP Professional, and was nearly identical to IIS 5.0 on Windows 2000.
IIS 6.0 was included with Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP Professional x64 Edition.
IIS 7.0 was a complete redesign and rewrite of IIS, and was shipped with Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008.
IIS 7.0 included a new modular design that allowed for increased performance. It also introduced a hierarchical configuration system allowing for simpler site deploys, a new Windows Forms-based management application, and the latest in JavaScript technologies.
IIS 7.0 on Vista does not limit the number of allowed connections as IIS on XP did, but limits concurrent requests to 10 or 3.
Additional requests are queued, which hinders performance, but the requests are not rejected as with XP.
IIS 7.5 was included in Windows 7 (but it must be turned on in side panel of Programs and Features) and Windows Server 2008 R2.
IIS 7.5 improved WebDAV and FTP modules as well as command-line administration in PowerShell. It also introduced TLS 1.1 and TLS 1.2 support and the Best Practices Analyzer tool and process isolation for application pools.

JavaServer Pages are Sun's implementation for creating Web pages that display dynamic content.
JavaServer Pages: Sun's implementation for creating Web pages that display dynamic content. Sun Microsystems was acquired by Oracle on January 27, 2010.

A servlet^[1] is a small application that runs on an Internet server. They are typically Java- and Perl-based alternatives to CGI^[2] scripts. Java servlets offer persistence over CGI. The term "servlet" typically describes a server-side Java application, however, the term is not Java-specific.

PHP (Personal Home Page), from the German Hypertext Preprocessor, is a specialized scripting language used to extract data from a database and present it on a Web page. PHP code is embedded within HTML pages and is executed on the server. PHP runs in the Linux operating system environment on Apache servers.
In the next lesson, you will learn what architectural considerations to take into account when developing applications and Web sites.

Click the link below to review server-side technologies and dynamic Web page generation.
Dynamic Web Page - Generation

[1]Servlet: A small application that runs on an Internet server. They are typically Java- and Perl-based alternatives to CGI scripts.

[2]CGI:Common Gateway Interface (CGI) is a specification for writing programs that enables transactions between a Web server and other programs on a server.