Yea, thanks. I basically just want to be able to go to a website and
it'll automatically run the program when the page is loaded and then
give me the information I need.
I'm still hunting.
that's pretty vague still.
You want to run a program in the client (web browser) or on the
server (host of the web site)?
You want a dynamically generated site ( parts of the site)?
If so, there are some things to learn.
Not terribly difficult, but you will have to learn to do some things.
You will need more specific details of what you want to do.
For dynamic sites, you could write the program in just about any
language, though some are not very practical.
Interpreted languages are most popular for this sort of thing, such
as Perl, PHP, Python and Ruby, but you could do it in C, C++, Java,
SmallTalk, or almost anything.
Some will be easier to use than others.
Nobody writes everything, it's not practical. Libraries are used.
Some libraries are more extensive than others. Some libraries are
more coherently focused on web development than others. Some
libraries are more focused into a system of development and are
called 'frameworks'.
Rails is a web development framework (or system) written in Ruby.
There are others, such as IOWA and Merb and Camping, all done in Ruby.
Maypole is a framwork in Perl. Symfony and Cake are PHP frameworks.
Seaside is a Smalltalk framework. Plone and Django o are Python
frameworks. Struts is a Java framework. All of these are examples of
web development frameworks.
Each language has libraries of functions/methods/constants/etc... for
things like web development or image processing or file manipulation.
Examples are Ruby DBI, or Perl DBI, which are similar libraries in
those languages for interfacing with a database.
Frameworks make use of existing libraries for a language and
generally add additional libraries that are (often) specific to that
framework and language. Frameworks also include a design methodology
that ties all of those things together with the goal of creating
writing software quickly and hopefully not having to recreate the
same things again and again, focusing on creating common things
easily (an example is the concept of CRUD applications, Create,
Retrieve, Update, Destroy data, most applications are CRUD apps that
do those things with some kind of data store, usually a database like
MySQL, Oracle, or SQLite, but possibly a text file, or even many
files in the operating system.)
Now for web site development, you have some choices. PHP is a
language that was originally designed around web site development. It
has a lot of libraries and functions that are geared toward web
development. Therefore, it has become quite popular. However, it
hasn't had a lot of free, open-source frameworks available and
popular. Most often people have developed their own proprietary
frameworks with PHP.
Python, Perl, and Ruby have all been more general in nature from the
beginning. These languages also have libraries that are geared toward
things like web development, but these languages also have libraries
geared toward doing other things as well.
Rails has been the killer-app for Ruby. It just happens to be a very
well designed web development framework that has inspired more than a
few frameworks in other languages as well. (symfony and cake borrow
many ideas from Rails)
Those frameworks are great if you use PHP, but they're missing some
things. Many of the things that make Rails successful and popular are
because of the Ruby language itself. Ruby tends to facilitate good
design and readability.
Each language has its own strengths. Perl has traditionally been the
king of processing text and has some incredibly extensive libraries.
Perl was the original CGI scripting language because of its text
processing abilities and the fact that web servers were originally
managed by systems administrators who also used Perl for lots of
system admin tasks.
Python has similar qualities of Perl and Ruby. Some people simply
prefer Python over Ruby or vice versa.
Your choice of language, libraries and frameworks should be based on
personal taste and practical needs and capabilities.
If you're starting out, you can't go wrong. If you already know a
programming language you might want to go with web development in the
same or a similar language.
That said, Ruby is not tough to learn and has a great community, and
I'd say the same for Python. Perl can be a little tougher to learn
because it is a little more cryptic, but it also has a great
community. PHP is not tough to learn, but it is a lot less graceful
than Ruby, Perl or Python. The PHP community is not always so kind.
There are lots of jobs with PHP, but there is a lot of really badly
designed software in PHP that is in use in companies too.
From personal experience, I can assure you, maintaining or working
with other people's code can be a pain. Open source and free software
is wonderful, but has a (usually well-deserved) reputation for being
messy and confusing. Ruby (and Python) tends to be really clean and
fairly easy to read and maintain. PHP is usually a good example of
mess. Perl is just very easy to make things very cryptic.
You might do well to browse a bookstore on some of these frameworks.
