Web Presence Architecture Technologies

Guest editor: Wes Chou, Cisco

Total pages: 37

$29.00

Introduction

Selecting the right technologies for an effective Web presence architecture can be more of an art than a science. Fanatical debates rage on blogs and wikis between followers of one language versus another. However, focusing on the functional specifications of a Web site and analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of each language or paradigm will allow for a scalable and maintainable solution.

Although it is useful from a development standpoint to separate the tools that execute as part of a Web browser itself (front end) from those that execute on the Web server (back end), the two components are often intertwined. For example, a PHP script runs on the Web server, but is actually generating the HTML content run on the Web browser.

As an introduction to the various languages used in Web 2.0, the first article in this collection, "Developers Shift to Dynamic Programming Languages," provides a brief highlight of the common tools of the trade, such as JavaScript, PHP, Python, and Ruby. Again, some overlap exists between functionality of various tools, and it is often up to the user to determine which language is best for his or her needs. The second article in this collection, "Programming the Web: The W3C DOM Specification", is admittedly Web 1.0 in scope. However, the DOM model provides the crucial abstraction layer upon which Web 2.0 + tools will reside, and an understanding of the power of DOM allows for rapid and efficient Web Programming.

"A Comparison of Distributed Groupware Implementation Environments" provides a case study insight into selected combinations of tools and paradigms, and their perceived strengths and weaknesses. Meanwhile, "Simplifying Ajax-style Web Development" begins more of a "deep dive" as it goes into a little more detail of Ajax and highlights more operational and implementation issues to be considered.

Finally, the "Web Server Architectures" article touches on fine-tuning the Web server itself to gain performance. Although this does not involve the language or tool selections, it provides a segue to the platform tuning that will be required once the Web presence is successfully launched.

Keywords (copy from all the articles' digital lib. abstract pages): Web technologies, Web development, Ajax techniques, W3C, DOM, groupware,

Table of Contents

Developers Shift to Dynamic Programming Languages

Linda Dailey Paulson

Because dynamic programming languages are flexible and allow writing more to-the-point code, developers are increasingly using them as an alternative to the more widely used static languages such as C++ and Java.

Programming the Web: The W3C DOM Specification

Lauren Wood, SoftQuad Software

Summary (25-40 wds): Developers manipulating Web documents to provide user interaction need a standard interface to those documents. The W3C Document Object Model Level 1 defines the standardized interface.

A Comparison of Distributed Groupware Implementation Environments

Conan C. Albrecht, Brigham Young University

This article compares popular client and server architectures used for groupware. It presents a client framework and evaluates native, installed clients, Java-based applications, and Web-based architectures.

Simplifying Ajax-style Web Development

Keith Smith, Microsoft

A new framework makes it easier to create rich Web experiences using Ajax techniques.

Web Server Architectures

Daniel A. Menasce, George Mason University

This column provides a classification of Web server architectures, offers a quantitative analysis of some possible software architectural options, and discusses the importance of software contention on overall response time.

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