Internet applications programming

The growth of the Internet and its centrality in business, education, and other fields has led many programmers to specialize in Internet-related applications. These can include the following:

•  low-level infrastructure (networking [wired and wire-less], routing, encryption support, and so on)

•  Web servers and related software

•  e-commerce infrastructure (see e-commerce)

•  interfacing with databases

•  data analysis and extraction (see data mining)

•  support for searching (see search engine)

•  autonomous software to navigate the net (see soft-ware agent)

•  Internet-based communications (see texting and instant messaging and VoIP)

•  systems to deliver text and media (see streaming, podcasting, rss)

•  support for collaborative use of the Internet (see blogs and blogging, social networking, and wikis and Wikipedia)

•  security software (firewalls, intrusion analysis, etc.)

Internet applications programmers use a variety of lan-guages and other programming tools (often in combina-tion) to implement these applications. Some of the most common are:

•  C++ is generally used for fundamental applications, particularly those that must work at the system level and for which speed and efficiency are prerequisites. Examples would include Web servers and browsers and some browser plug-ins (see C++).

•  Java has largely supplanted C++ as a general-pur-pose language for programming small applications (“applets”) that are hosted by Web sites and run on the user’s browser. With a syntax that differs in only a few respects from C++, Java can also be used to write standalone applications (see Java).

•  HTML is not really a full-fledged programming lan-guage, but it defines the layout and formatting of Web pages, as well as providing for hyperlinks and the embedding of applications. In many cases, HTML no longer has to be coded directly but can be generated from word processor-like page design programs (see dntml, html, and xhtml).

•  Extensible markup language (see xml) has become the preferred format for structuring a variety of data both for automatic processing (see semantic Web) and for feeding dynamic Web pages (see Ajax).

•  Scripting languages are an important tool for Inter-net and Web development. CGI (Common Gateway Interface) is a facility that allows scripts to control the interaction between HTML forms on a Web page and other programs such as databases (see cgi). CGI scripts are written in scripting languages (see

JavaScript, Perl, php, Python, and scripting lan-guages). Use of CGI is being gradually supplanted by applets written in Java as well as other scripting languages such as JavaScript and VBScript.

•  Active Server Pages (ASP) is a facility that uses Win-dows ActiveX components to process scripts created in Visual Basic, which in turn create HTML pages “on the fly” and send them to the user’s Web browser.

•  microsoft’s recent .NET initiative represents an attempt to integrate Internet connectivity and distrib-uted operation into the programming framework for all major languages.

•  Similar technologies are available for other platforms such as Linux (see Ajax and document object model)

Trends

Experienced programmers will continue to be needed for creating and extending the infrastructure for the Internet and Web and for providing increasingly powerful and easy-to-use tools for developing Web sites. However, the wide variety of tools now available means that people with less experience will be able to design and implement attrac-tive and effective Web pages, plugging in functionality such as online shopping, conferencing, and site-specific search engines. If web development follows the same course as traditional programming, predictions that specialized pro-grammers will no longer be needed will prove premature. At the same time, generalist web developers will be able to do more.