With the current browser wars and competition for the dominance in
the enterprise Web services market, it is hard to rely on the dynamic
capabilities of the client side, namely the Browser. Browsers are
made intentionally incompatible and nonportable by software companies in the
defiance to existing standards. The promise that the Web browser becomes
a Universal GUI is essentially lost. The victims are users.
We cannot count on the presence of Java (or VBScript, for that matter)
in the Web Client. The situation appears to get worse every month, with
software vendors trying to mess up the stuff which used to work until now.
However, browser can still display text and pictures, and also do some
primitive JavaScript. While you, as a developer, do not have control over
the browser and software installed on the client, you control the server.
For this reason, server side dynamic content is now a focal point of Web
development. We will talk about the following technologies:
- CGI -- Common Gateway Interface
- SSI -- Server Side Includes
- Servlets/JSP -- Java Servlets and Java Server Pages
