Running Programs on a Web Server

Besides serving static HTML pages, many web servers can also execute programs that create the HTML output for the browser. To do this, the web server must be running a server-side programming language. Some of the most popular languages are PHP, ASP, Java, PERL, ColdFusion, and now VB.NET and C#.

The most popular web server, Apache, doesn't directly support any specific programming language, but is very often configured to work with PHP, Java, or PERL. You can also install any of the other supported languages yourself.

Windows based web servers usually support ASP (Active Server Pages) applications that are written in VBScript, a simplified version of Visual Basic. The newer, .NET servers can execute VB.NET and C# programs.

If you do not have experience with these languages, you can use a code generator, such as CodeCharge (http://www.codecharge.com) to generate your web applications in many popular technologies.

See also: