Scripting Languages

As mentioned on our homepage, there are many different scripts to choose from.

Most commonly, you’ve got ASP, Chili!Soft ASP, PHP, JSP, CGI and ColdFusion. Don’t let those mysterious three-letter acronyms throw you off = the all have one thing in common: to help you create dynamic web pages.

On this page, we’ll explore each of the above noted scripts, giving you a closer look at these web-hosting tools.

ASP (Active Server Pages)

ASP was Microsoft’s first server-side script engine, and has now by superseded by ASP.NET. This script supports the Component Object Model. Some web pages with the .asp file extension obviously use ASP, but some sites disguise this fact by using the .htm or .html extension). Most ASP pages are written in VBScript, but other common codes are JScript and PerlScript.

Chili!Soft ASP

More of a bridging tool for those on Virtual Private Servers (VPS), Chili!Soft ASP is a fully-compliant ASP interpreter, ensuring that Microsoft ASP runs seamlessly on VPSs. Chili!Soft supports JScript and VBScript ASP layout, along wide various popular database interfaces such as MySQL, Oracle and PostgreSQL. Note that ColdFusion and Chili!Soft cannot run simultaneously on the same VPS. One or the other needs to be installed – not both.

PHP (originally standing for Personal Home Page)

Widely used, PHP is a general-purpose scripting language, with its code embedded in the HTML source document, which is then interpreted by a web server with a PHP processing module, which then generates the web page. Note that PHP is free software that’s released under the PHP License and that it’s not compatible with the GNU General Public License (GPL) because of term restrictions.

JSP (JavaServer Pages)

JSP is a Java technology that allows developers to create dynamically-generated web pages (with HTML, XML, or other document types), in direct response to a Web client request to a Java-based server. This technology allows Java code to be embedded into static page content, then compiled on the server at each of the page requests’ runtimes.

ColdFusion

ColdFusion is a rapid application development platform that hit the scene in 1995. It was originally designed to make it easy or easier to connect simple HTML pages to a database. It’s now grown to become a full platform that includes an IDE, and a full scripting language. Sold by Adobe Systems, ColdFusion includes advanced enterprise integration (i.e. networking) features along with tools for rich internet applications development.

CGI (Common Gateway Interface)

CGI is a standard protocol that defines how web server software delegates web page generation to a console application. These apps are known as CGI scripts, and can be written in any programming language (though scripting languages like those discussed above are often used). A strong example of CGI is a wiki, which is a website that allows for the relatively easy creation editing of any number of interconnected web pages via a web browser utilizing a simple markup language or a WYSIWYG text editor.