Numerous scripts, languages, frameworks exist for web application development. It requires wide and in-depth knowledge on multiple technologies to choose the right one that fits the need. This blog entry tries to provide a very simple and beginner level information for web application development.
When you try to develop a web application, first, analyse the type of web application you would want. Following are some of the analysis points.
- Will the web site only contain static content? For e.g., the name of your business, a description about your products and services, etc.
- Does your web site have dynamic content? For e.g., you require users to feed in some inputs and you want to process those inputs to produce the web site content specific to that situation? Say, you want to accept the total loan amount to tell the user about the monthly installments?
- Does your web site need to coordinate with various back end systems such as Credit card processing?
- Do you want to provide e-commerce? i.e., providing shopping carts and accepting payments?
- Do you like to provide Forum, Blogs, News ?
- Do you need to provide multimedia content?
- Do you want to provide classified ads?
There are many combinations of technologies that will help to achieve your needs. The effectiveness of each technology depends on much more wider set of parameters such as scalability, proprietary vs. open source choice, learning curve, performance, computational resource availability, etc.
While static web content may be delivered using HTML alone, everything else requires lot more technologies to be used for efficient delivery.
In this blog, I write about end to end needs of rolling out static web site. There are many other simpler ways possible to host a web site other the one described here. For e.g., this blogspot is a free hosting service from Google for my Blogs. Many such simple hosting services are available as well.
Technology:
When it comes to web, the primary thing to know is HTML. This technology knowledge alone is sufficient to create your own static content web site.
Tools:
No tools are required for pure HTML editing. Any text editor is good enough. However, there are very good open source and commercial tools available. List of HTML editors can be known from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HTML_editors .
Ref:
- Very easy to follow HTML tutorial is available in http://www.w3schools.com/htmL/
- The specification can be read from http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/
How to put your HTML internet:
This is a three step process. First you have to buy a Domain Name, then Hosting Resources (disk space, bandwidth, computational power, OS, database, etc.) and then place your HTML in the Hosting Resource. This may sound a bit complicated first, but only for the first time.
Buying a domain name is easiest. www.register.com , www.godaddy.com are the couple of sites among thousands who sell domain registrations for a fee. When you buy your domain name, normally the service providers allow you to buy Hosting Resources in the form of various packages.
If you have bought hosting resource from the same service provider from whom you bought the web site, they'll provide you instructions to put your content in the hosting server. Couple of tools you'll need to know now. FileZilla (downloadable and installable in your computer) helps you to FTP your HTML to the Hosting Server. You will get the FTP account name and password from the Hosting Service provider when you buy Hosting Resource. The hosting service providers provide a tool called "cPanel" that stands for Control Panel. The cPanel is accessible by a website address and user id / password. cPanel provides wide variety of features to interact with Hosting Resources. Once you have transferred the HTML to the hosting server and managed the directory structure using cPanel, your site is accessible over internet.
In case you have registered your domain with one service provider and bought hosting server resources with other service provider, you'll need to configure the DNS server address at the domain registration place.
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