Appropriate Technology

Interactive web technology began with simple scripting languages adapted from platform shell scripting. It advanced quickly to powerful, flexible, web-specific scripting languages, such as Microsoft's ASP/VBScript and cross-platform PHP. Today we finally have a choice of full-fledged programming languages at our disposal, with enormous libraries of built-in, reusable functional code.

Enterprise Java and Microsoft's formidable ASP.NET are the big guns of the web development world and should remain so for the foreseeable future. Despite the division of the world into pro and anti-Microsoft camps, the two environments provide similar rock solid architectures built upon pure object-oriented foundations. A web application built on either platform can be, not a loose collection of cooperating web scripts, but rather an instance of a real application, residing on the server in the same sense that a desktop application resides on the workstation.

Open-source PHP began life as a powerful but unsophisticated scripting language, an adaptation of Perl for the web server environment. Intended as a quick and dirty way to get interactive web pages working, PHP can still be used in this way. However, the language has evolved to support sophisticated object-oriented design and variations of the MVC application architecture. Web applications built in PHP can now be as secure and maintainable as Java and ASP.NET applications, while benefiting from rapid development techniques with their resulting lower development costs.