Open source, great development environment - PHP is a cult. This has been the answer of open source programmers to Microsofts ASP. PHP not only carries all the goodness of ASP but also is more secure and handles databases more easily. It is a known fact that PHP on Apache Web server runs faster than ASP. PHP code is embedded inside the HTML page and can link to databases to generate dynamic HTML content. Furthermore, PHP scripts can be made to run on any operating system with little or no modification.

HTML - HyperText Markup Language

HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is the lingua franca of the Internet. It is the languageused to develop web pages. Hypertext means that some text in the HTML document carries a link to a different location, which can be on the same page or another page. On clicking this 'hot spot', the viewer is transferred to that location. Markup means that specific portions of a document are marked up to indicate how they should be displayed in the browser. According to purists, HTML is not a language per se, and they are right in one way. HTML simply consists of tags that are placed around elements, which then changes the properties of these enclosed elements. There are hundreds of HTML tags and some of these are proprietary, which means that only some browsers recognize them.

Javascript/Jscript

Javascript is a programming language that runs on a web browser. It was developed by the same folks who gave us Netscape and was first implemented in version 2 of the browser. Jscript is Microsofts' implementation of Javascript for Internet Explorer. By the by, Javascript is not a subset of Java, infact, the two languages share little in common (yes, they share a few basic concepts but the syntax is different and so is the application). Naming their language "JavaScript", was just a clever marketing ploy by Netscape Communications. It was initially called Livescript but when Sun Microsystems released Java and it became very popular, Netscape renamed their scripting language to JavaScript.

Javascript runs on the browser (client) and does not require any server software. Thus, it is a client-side scripting language. Since all execution takes place on the browser, Javascript is responsible for most of the interactivity on a web page. Image change or text color change on mouseover, creating mouse trails are all possible through Javascript. The language has also been widely used for basic form validation. This seems logical, as it is better to validate a form on the client side than to make several trips to the server. Javascript is commonly embedded inside the HTML page and is thus visible to the visitor.

XML - eXtensible Markup Language

The eXtensible Markup Language is a web page developing language that enables programmers to create customized tags. These customized tags can provide the much-needed functionality not available with HTML. XML documents can be accessed using JSP, PHP etc.