Web programming

Web programming, also known as web development, is the creation of dynamic web applications.

Examples of web applications are social networking sites like Facebook or e-commerce sites like Amazon.

A web environment is defined as a full website or website application stack containing everything the website or application needs to deliver features and content to users.

This includes, but is not limited to, the following:

• A dedicated parcel of server space
• Memory
• A database
• An operating system
• Application services

There are two broad divisions of web development, they are:

1. Front-End Development (also called client-side development)

Front-end development refers to constructing what a user sees when they load a web application – the content, design and how you interact with it. This is done with three codes – HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

2. Back-End Development ( also called server-side development)

Back-end development controls what goes on behind the scenes of a web application. A back-end often uses a database to generate the front-end.

History of Web Environment

• The development of the World Wide Web was begun in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee and his colleagues at CERN, an international scientific organization based in Geneva, Switzerland. They created a protocol, HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP), which standardized communication between servers and clients.
• Their text- based Web browser was made available for general release in January 1992.
• The World Wide Web gained rapid acceptance with the creation of a Web browser called Mosaic, which was developed in the United States by Marc Andreessen and others at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois and was released in September 1993. By the mid-1990s the World Wide Web had millions of active users.
• The software giant Microsoft Corporation became interested in supporting Internet applications on personal computers and developed its own Web browser (based initially on Mosaic), Internet Explorer (IE), in 1995 as an add-on to the Windows 95 operating system.
• IE was integrated into the Windows operating system in 1996 (that is, it came “bundled” ready- to-use within the operating system of personal computers), which had the effect of reducing competition from other Internet browser manufacturers, such as Netscape. IE soon became the most popular Web browser.
• Apple’s Safari was released in 2003 as the default browser on Macintosh personal computers and later on iPhones (2007) and iPads (2010).
• The first serious challenger to IE’s dominance was Mozilla’s Firefox, released in 2004 and designed to address issues with speed and security that had plagued IE.
• In 2008 Google launched Chrome, the first browser with isolated tabs, which meant that when one tab crashed, other tabs and the whole browser would still function. By 2013 Chrome had become the dominant browser, surpassing IE and Firefox in popularity. Microsoft discontinued IE and replaced it with Edge in 2015.

In the early 21st century, smartphones became more computer-like, and more advanced services, such as Internet access, became possible. Web usage on smartphones steadily increased, and in 2016 it accounted for more than half of Web browsing.

 World Wide Web (WWW), byname the Web, the leading information retrieval service of the Internet (the worldwide computer network). The Web gives users access to a vast array of documents that are connected to each other by means of hypertext or hypermedia links—i.e., hyperlinks, electronic connections that link related pieces of information in order to allow a user easy access to them.

Hypertext allows the user to select a word or phrase from text and thereby access other documents that contain additional information pertaining to that word or phrase.

Hypermedia documents feature links to images, sounds, animations, and movies.

The Web operates within the Internet’s basic client-server format; servers are computer programs that store and transmit documents to other computers on the network when asked to, while clients are programs that request documents from a server as the user asks for them. Browser software allows users to view the retrieved documents.