At the start of this chapter, I introduced the world of Web 1.0, but it wasn’t long before
the rush was on to create Web 1.1, with the development of such browser enhancements
as Java, JavaScript, JScript (Microsoft’s slight variant of JavaScript), and ActiveX. On the
server side, progress was being made on the Common Gateway Interface (CGI) using
scripting languages such as Perl (an alternative to the PHP language) and server-side
scripting—inserting the contents of one file (or the output of a system call) into another
one dynamically.
Once the dust had settled, three main technologies stood head and shoulders above the
others. Although Perl was still a popular scripting language with a strong following,
PHP’s simplicity and built-in links to the MySQL database program had earned it more
than double the number of users. And JavaScript, which had become an essential part
of the equation for dynamically manipulating CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and HTML,
now took on the even more muscular task of handling the client side of the Ajax process.
Under Ajax, web pages perform data handling and send requests to web servers in the
background—without the web user being aware that this is going on.
No doubt the symbiotic nature of PHP and MySQL helped propel them both forward,
but what attracted developers to them in the first place? The simple answer has to be
the ease with which you can use them to quickly create dynamic elements on websites.
MySQL is a fast and powerful, yet easy-to-use, database system that offers just aboutanything a website would need in order to find and serve up data to browsers. When
PHP allies with MySQL to store and retrieve this data, you have the fundamental parts
required for the development of social networking sites and the beginnings of Web 2.0.
And when you bring JavaScript and CSS into the mix too, you have a recipe for building
highly dynamic and interactive websites.
