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brifusg

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which way should I choose?

Dear all,

I learnt HTML about 2 years ago, but just made static HTML almost the time.
Now, I decide to turn to dynamic HTML. But nowadays, there are numerous ways to create them. I have heard asp, jsp, .NET, php. I am so confused.

Could anyone advise my what is the most popular language for web service?

Any idea will be appreciated very much.
brifusg
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Kaoscrew-Sixpack

This is a tough question because people would answer what they are currently using and/or what they personally prefer, so I'll yeah my personal opion.  If the webpages are going to be basic nothing techincal (which I'm getting from the question), if your website wants to be in a Microsoft enviroment, then make it ASP pages.  This is nice because if you decide on a particular laout and the contents will change from page to page, you can seperate the header section and the footer section as includes per page.

Another is the JAVA approach which can run on basically any operating system platform.  You can still do the same concept as listed above, but once the page is cached (when you call it), if the include files are changed in any way, you will also have to open those pages and resave them.  The new time stamp on the main webpage being called will recache the include files.

In short, if iits simple, but you want to make it dymanic, and you know HTML pretty good, either route is fine.  However, everyone is going through the Java approach, so start learning Java, and then you'll see that ASP is quite similar to Java, just in different calls.

Take care. Six
your decision should be based on:
1-your platform/budget
2-your needs/audience
3-your existing skills

asp/.net/vbscript work on the microsoft platform, not free!
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/nhp/Default.asp?contentid=28000440
php is open source, platform independent, free!
http://www.php.net/
javascript is client side scripting (good to learn) works on all new browsers, platform independent, free!
http://www.javascriptsource.com/
java is platform independent, harder to learn but very cool!
http://java.sun.com/
mySQL works great with anything, free, open source database: http://www.mysql.com/

bottom line:
-learn ASP/VBScript/SQL (Server)/Oracle if you are working with Microsoft products etc.
-learn PHP/JavaScript/MySQL if you are wanting to get your own database driven dynamic web site on a hosted domain (many companies are offering really good price)

hope this helps ;)
LAMP (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP)

unless you are doing enterprise level work, using the above technologies are, in my opinion, your best bet, especially if you are not super technical. PHP has a wonderful user base a nd community for providing free scripts for almost any need you may have. There are plenty of web interfaces to make using MySQL databases very easy. And yes, Linux hosting is amazingly cheap.

BTW, a good host i have found is www.cheapwebhost.us
they have a number of different Linux plans, some as low as $7/year, and every plan comes with a web-based control panel, PHP installed, a number of tools to help with all aspects of your site, from stats to scripts, to mysql databases and email management. give them a try!

Good luck!
TomC
I just answered this question pretty comprehensively at this site:
https://www.experts-exchange.com/questions/20532217/Building-sites.html 

Personally, I recommend Cold Fusion for programmers coming from the HTML world because Cold Fusion is written using the Cold Fusion Markup Language - a language similar in syntax to HTML (but very powerful).
The above are all server side scripting.  People mean two different things when they say 'dynamic' html.

One is dynamically generated, database driven html.  Which you can achieve with one of the above platforms.

The other is DHTML which is client side manipulation of html.  DHTML first got big with IE4, and now the W3C (world wide web consortium) has a new DOM (document object model) that is cross-browser compatible and allows even more extensive client side manipulation of page elements - everything from simple animations to creating new form fields on the fly.

The site w3schools.com has the best tutorials on the web.
ASP: http://www.w3schools.com/asp/default.asp
DHTML: http://www.w3schools.com/dhtml/dhtml_intro.asp
Javascript: http://www.w3schools.com/js/default.asp
CSS (Stylesheets): http://www.w3schools.com/css/default.asp

First I would catch up on everything that's changed with HTML, CSS, Javascript, and DHTML before I set out to learn server side scripting.  Everything I just mentioned you can play with for free with nothing more than Notepad and a browser (though HTML-Kit - free from www.chami.com - is much nicer to use).  To me it makes sense to learn all the client side stuff that your server side processing may be spitting out.
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