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Developers Tools & Technology

In early days the site building, which was called web page designing, was written with the windows NotPad editor or DOS editor. These days there are at least more than dozen HTML editors, which can generate HTML code for you on the fly while you create the document.  Among them are Netscape Composer, HomeSite, Hotdog, HotMetal, and so on. These editors do not need any server environment to design web pages.  But editors like FrontPage, NetObject Fusion, Visual Interdev, and ColdFusion need server environment for building a site with them.   For example, FrontPage needs either Mircosoft Personal Web Server or Internet Information Server. 

    Mircrosoft FrontPage: There are two versions of FrontPage.   One developers and another regular FrontPage.  Internet Explorer 5.0 encludes FrontPage editor as one of its editors.  This version of Internet Explorer has made editing pretty handy and convenient.  However, the developers FrontPage is very sophisticated and is included in the BackOffice 4.5.  It includes JavaScript, VBScript, ASP, XML and all the features of DHTML.

    Microsoft Visual Interdev 6.0 is a very advanced site building tool.  It is the tool meant to develop Active Server Pages to execute on the Internet Information Server.  Moreover, it is integrated with JavaScript as its client side script, VBScript as its both server side and client script, Design Time Control (DTC) as Visual Interdev Scripting Model. It is also intergrated with all the features of DHTML such as Cascading styleSheet.  It has full support for ADO and RDS technology. However, you must have experience and knowledge of HTML, JavaScript, SQL and Visual Basic programming to develop web applications with Visual Interdev.  Also, it requires strong background on relational database and Windows NT Server. Applications are developed on a server environment.

    Topic Allaire ColdFusion: ColdFusion of Allaire Corp is one of the most flexiable web application development tools.  You can run on the Windows NT IIS, Unix Solaris Apache,  Netscape Eterprise or O'Reilly Pro. It comes with both CGI and Server API. This means you can execute application on both interfaces.  It includes Server APIs for all the HTTP servers such as APACHE for Windows NT, ISAPI for IIS, NSAPI for Netscape Enterprise, and WSAPI for O'Reilly.  CFML the ColdFusion Markup Language is modeled after HTML.  One of ColdFusion's most powerful features is its capability to connect to data created and maintained in other applications. ColdFusion can retrieve and update data in many applications such as corporate database, client/server database, spreadsheets, text files, etc. ColdFusion executes CGI application with this syntax: http://www.myapp.com/cgi/cfml.exe?
    template=/myapp/hello.cfm and Server API syntax: http://www.myapp.com/hello.cfml.   Server API execution is faster and more reliable. 

There are many other tools for developing internet applications. You can develop web applications with Visual Basic, Borland's JBuilder, Semantec's Visual Cafe, PowerBuilder, etc.  However, these tools need a lot of basic coding. Whereas tools like Visual Interdev and ColdFusion have all these build-in components. The main technologies for site building are CGI, ASP, DHTML, JavaScript,  VBScript and Cascading styleSheet.  XML, the extended markup language, is doing many slick things specially for security and in near future it will be one of the most sophisticated technology for the site building.  

Designed by
Prakash Bom