Milestone Four: The Art of Programming

“The process of preparing programs for a digital computer is especially attractive, not only because it can be economically and scientifically rewarding, but also because it can be an aesthetic experience much like poetry or music” – Donald E Knuth, 1970.

Not everyone has the same affinity for programming languages as Donald Knuth. Knuth, after all, is a famous scientist and programmer who devoted most of his life to computer science and the development of algorithms. At least, however, we should have a healthy appreciation for programming languages and for those who use them to program the many computer applications that we use to make our daily lives much easier.

With websites becoming increasingly more interactive, programming languages play a big role in web and e-commerce applications. Without the support of a programming language, HTML could do very little more than simply display pages of static content. It is the strength of programming languages, along with the creativity of programmers who use them, that give web applications the functionality to perform tasks and services as well as display dynamic content. Take, for example, your online banking website. This site can be used to retrieve account balances and transactions from your checking account. You can edit your address information. You can pay bills, transfer funds, and so on. All these functions had to be programmed by a professional programmer using a programming language.

When it comes to web applications, there are two types of programming.

Client-Side Programming refers to programming steps that are executed by the browser on the “client” computer (that is your computer). This technique is used, in some cases, to verify user input. For example, it might be used to make sure that when you type in your bank account number only numeric characters are accepted. JavaScript is a widely used programming language used for client-side programming.

Server-Sided Programming refers to programming tasks that are executed by the web server itself. This type of programming is used to manipulate data that may reside on a database server as well as perform calculations on those data. Server sided programming is used to create “dynamic” web that “push” information form the server to the browser. For example, when you request to see your account transactions, a server-sided program will retrieve those transactions from a database and will forward them to your browser so that they can be dynamically displayed on the screen of you computer. Some widely used server-sided programming tools include: Structured Query Language (SQL), Active Server Pages (ASP), Java Server Pages (JSP), PHP, Cold Fusion, Visual Basic, C++, and Perl.