| Hand coded HTML | Web pages are simple ASCII text files with tags added to the content. The tags govern the layout and appearance of the page when it is displayed in a Web client. The tags are referred to as HTML, hypertext markup language tags.
As a CIS major, you must learn hand coding in order to be able to adjust and modify sites generated with Web development tools and to be able to write programs that generate HTML pages. |
| WYSIWYG development tool | If a page is static and has a relatively simple layout, the quickest way to create it is to hand code it using an ASCII text editor like Notepad or TextPad. If a site has a complex layout and dynamic behavior (like buttons that change appearance when the mouse rolls over them), it will be faster to use a WYSIWIG (what you see is what you get) development tool like DreamWeaver or Front Page. |
| Portal/content management tool | Content management systems allow one quickly build complex Web sites in which many people contribute content. They use templates which determine the overall appearance of the site, have facilities for registering users and restricting their access to content, allow a manager to screen content before it is published, etc.
The site settings and the content are stored in a database, and users and the site designer typically make changes using only a Web browser |
| Application services -- mashups | Many Web sites display information that is transparently transferred from another one. For example, when you track an order you placed at Amazon.com, the data you see comes from the United Parcel Service Web site, travel Web sites that display flight arrival time, transfer it from the Federal Aviation Administration, Mapquest maps are found on many Web sites, the New York Times technology product reviews come from CNET.com, etc. Servers make their data available to other services do so through an application programming interface (API) which tells programmers how to extract data for use in their applications. These compound applications are informally referred to as mashups, and they are a very important and proliferating rapidly. |
| Generalized platforms |
Common services like wikis, blogs, and social networks began as relatively limited, hand programmed applications. As demand for them grew, programmers raised the level of abstraction. For example, instead of writing a blog program, a programmer identifies the characteristics of blog programs, and writes a more complex program that lets non-programmers create blogs by selecting characteristic values. These generalized programs make creating a blog very simple, but they are not as flexible as writing an independent program.
Consider this trivial example. One of the characteristics of a payroll calculator is the income tax rate. This program always deducts 20 percent. This generalized version lets the user choose the percent. |