Most common terms on web development

CMS - A content management system (CMS) is the collection of procedures used to manage work flow in a collaborative environment. These procedures can be manual or computer-based. The procedures are designed to do the following:

Allow for a large number of people to contribute to and share stored data
Control access to data, based on user roles (defining which information users or user groups can view, edit, publish, etc.)
Aid in easy storage and retrieval of data
Reduce repetitive duplicate input
Improve the ease of report writing
Improve communication between users

In a CMS, data can be defined as nearly anything: documents, movies, pictures, phone numbers, scientific data, and so forth. CMSs are frequently used for storing, controlling, revising , semantically enriching, and publishing documentation. Serving as a central repository, the CMS increases the version level of new updates to an already existing file. Version control is one of the primary advantages of a CMS.

Ajax - Ajax (sometimes called Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) is a way of programming for the Web that gets rid of the hourglass. Data, content, and design are merged together into a seamless whole. When your customer clicks on something on an Ajax driven application, there is very little lag time. The page simply displays what they're asking for. There is very little lag and you don't have to wait for pages to refresh or reload.

Ajax is a way of developing Web applications that combines:

XHTML and CSS standards based presentation
Interaction with the page through the DOM
Data interchange with XML and XSLT
Asynchronous data retrieval with XMLHttpRequest
JavaScript to tie it all together

Javascript- Javascript is a programming language that is used to make web pages interactive. It runs on your visitor's computer and so does not require constant downloads from your web site.

HTML- HTML was invented in 1990 by a scientist called Tim Berners-Lee. The purpose was to make it easier for scientists at different universities to gain access to each other's research documents. The project became a bigger success than Tim Berners-Lee had ever imagined. By inventing HTML he laid the foundation for the web as we know it today.

HTML is an abbreviation of "HyperText Mark-up Language" - which is already more than you need to know at this stage. However, for the sake of good order, let us explain in greater detail.

Hyper is the opposite of linear. In the good old days - when a mouse was something the cat chased - computer programs ran linearly: when the program had executed one action it went to the next line and after that, the next line and so on. But HTML is different - you can go wherever you want and whenever you want. For example, it is not necessary to visit MSN.com before you visit HTML.net.
Text is self-explanatory.
Mark-up is what you do with the text. You are marking up the text the same way you do in a text editing program with headings, bullets and bold text and so on.
Language is what HTML is. It uses many English words.

SEO- Search Engine Optimization. Basic SEO is how search engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo! create the list of sites that are shown when someone types a word or phrase into the search bar. For instance, type in ‘computer’ and the user will be presented with all sorts of websites describing what computers are, selling computers and components, listing uses for computers etc.

ASP- (Classic ASP) Active Server Pages or Classic ASP, as it is more commonly known, is a technology that enables you to make dynamic and interactive web pages.
ASP uses server-side scripting to dynamically produce web pages that are not affected by the type of browser the web site visitor is using.
The default scripting language used for writing ASP is VBScript, although you can use other scripting languages like JScript (Microsoft's version of JavaScript).
ASP pages have the extension .asp instead of .htm, when a page with the extension .asp is requested by a browser the web server knows to interpret any ASP contained within the web page before sending the HTML produced to the browser. This way all the ASP is run on the web server and no ASP will ever be passed to the web browser.
Any web pages containing ASP cannot be run by just simply opening the page in a web browser. The page must be requested through a web server that supports ASP, this is why ASP stands for Active Server Pages, no server, no active pages.
As ASP was first introduced by Microsoft on it's web server, Internet Information Services (IIS), that runs on all versions of Windows from NT4, including Windows 7, Vista, XP Pro, and Windows Server OS's like Windows 2000, 2003, 2008, it is this web server that ASP pages usually run best on.

ASP.NET - A Microsoft server-side Web technology. ASP.NET takes an object-oriented programming approach to Web page execution. Every element in an ASP.NET page is treated as an object and run on the server . An ASP.NET page gets compiled into an intermediate language by a .NET Common Language Runtime-compliant compiler. Then a JIT compiler turns the intermediate code to native machine code , and that machine code is eventually run on the processor . Because the code is run straight from the processor, pages load much faster than classic ASP pages , where embedded VBScript or JScript had to be continuously interpreted and cached .

ASP.NET is used to create Web pages and Web services and is an integral part of Microsoft's .NET vision.

HOSTING - Hosting (also known as Web site hosting, Web hosting, and Webhosting) is the business of housing, serving, and maintaining files for one or more Web site s. More important than the computer space that is provided for Web site files is the fast connection to the Internet. Most hosting services offer connections on T-carrier system lines. Typically, an individual business hosting its own site would require a similar connection and it would be expensive. Using a hosting service lets many companies share the cost of a fast Internet connection for serving files.

CAPTCHA - Short for completely automated public turing test to tell computers and humans apart, a technique used by a computer to tell if it is interacting with a human or another computer. Because computing is becoming pervasive , and computerized tasks and services are commonplace, the need for increased levels of security has led to the development of this way for computers to ensure that they are dealing with humans in situations where human interaction is essential to security. Activities such as online commerce transactions, search engine submissions, Web polls, Web registrations, free e-mail service registration and other automated services are subject to software programs, or bots , that mimic the behavior of humans in order to skew the results of the automated task or perform malicious activities, such as gathering e-mail addresses for spamming or ordering hundreds of tickets to a concert.

PHP- PHP is a server-side scripting language for creating dynamic Web pages. You create pages with PHP and HTML. When a visitor opens the page, the server processes the PHP commands and then sends the results to the visitor's browser, just as with ASP or ColdFusion. Unlike ASP or ColdFusion, however, PHP is Open Source and cross-platform. PHP runs on Windows NT and many Unix versions, and it can be built as an Apache module and as a binary that can run as a CGI. When built as an Apache module, PHP is especially lightweight and speedy. Without any process creation overhead, it can return results quickly, but it doesn't require the tuning of mod_perl to keep your server's memory image small.

Database- The definition of a database is a structured collection of records or data that is stored in a computer system. In order for a database to be truly functional, it must not only store large amounts of records well, but be accessed easily. In addition, new information and changes should also be fairly easy to input. In order to have a highly efficient database system, you need to incorporate a program that manages the queries and information stored on the system. This is usually referred to as DBMS or a Database Management System. Besides these features, all databases that are created should be built with high data integrity and the ability to recover data if hardware fails.

MySQL - Is a database system used on the web. Basically, a MySQL database allows you to create a relational database structure on a web-server somewhere in order to store data or automate procedures. If you think of it in comparison to Microsoft Access, MySQL is what holds all of your tables, PHP acts as your queries (among other things), and your forms are basically web pages with fields in them. With all of this combined, you can create truly spectacular projects on the web.

MySQL is also open source in that it’s free and falls under the GNU General Public License (GPL). Chances are, if you are getting your own web-page or already have one – your host supports MySQL and PHP. They are generally associated with (though not limited to) Unix/Linux based servers. If by chance you are considering getting your own page and want MySQL and PHP support, check out Dreamhost – I’ve been using them for years and they absolutely can’t be beat.

SQL Server- SQL Server is a relational database management system (RDBMS) from Microsoft that's designed for the enterprise environment. SQL Server runs on T-SQL (Transact - SQL ), a set of programming extension s from

Flash- Flash is streaming animation for web pages. Sometimes Flash is a portion of an html web page, and sometimes a web page is made entirely of Flash. Either way, Flash files are called "Flash movies". These are special .swf format files that beam to your web browser screen as you watch them.

A bandwidth friendly and browser independent vector-graphic animation technology. As long as different browsers are equipped with the necessary plug-ins , Flash animations will look the same.

With Flash, users can draw their own animations or import other vector-based images.

Flash was known as FutureSplash until 1997, when Macromedia Inc. bought the company that developed it.

Domain- A domain name locates an organization or other entity on the Internet. For example, the domain name

www.item-soft.com

locates an Internet address for "item-soft.com" at Internet point 199.0.0.2 and a particular host server named "www". The "com" part of the domain name reflects the purpose of the organization or entity (in this example, "commercial") and is called the top-level domain name. The "item-soft" part of the domain name defines the organization or entity and together with the top-level is called the second-level domain name. The second-level domain name maps to and can be thought of as the "readable" version of the Internet address.

URL- A URL (Uniform Resource Locator, previously Universal Resource Locator) - usually pronounced by sounding out each letter but, in some quarters, pronounced "Earl" - is the unique address for a file that is accessible on the Internet. A common way to get to a Web site is to enter the URL of its home page file in your Web browser 's address line. However, any file within that Web site can also be specified with a URL. Such a file might be any Web ( HTML ) page other than the home page, an image file, or a program such as a common gateway interface application or Java applet . The URL contains the name of the protocol to be used to access the file resource, a domain name that identifies a specific computer on the Internet, and a pathname, a hierarchical description that specifies the location of a file in that computer.

On the Web (which uses the Hypertext Transfer Protocol, or HTTP), an example of a URL is:

http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2396.txt

HTTP- Short for HyperText Transfer Protocol, the underlying protocol used by the World Wide Web . HTTP defines how messages are formatted and transmitted, and what actions Web servers and browsers should take in response to various commands. For example, when you enter a URL in your browser, this actually sends an HTTP command to the Web server directing it to fetch and transmit the requested Web page

FTP - Short for File Transfer Protocol, the protocol for exchanging files over the Internet . FTP works in the same way as HTTP for transferring Web pages from a server to a user's browser and SMTP for transferring electronic mail across the Internet in that, like these technologies, FTP uses the Internet's TCP/IP protocols to enable data transfer.

FTP is most commonly used to download a file from a server using the Internet or to upload a file to a server (e.g., uploading a Web page file to a server).

XML - Short for Extensible Markup Language, a specification developed by the W3C . XML is a pared-down version of SGML , designed especially for Web documents. It allows designers to create their own customized tags , enabling the definition, transmission, validation, and interpretation of data between applications and between organizations.

Keywords- When a person performs a search through one of the major search engines, he typically types in keywords to find what he is looking for. Most regular internet users do not think about this when they type in their query . The results for the search show up on the results page, with the most relevant information typically towards the top of the list. Search engines use the use of keywords to determine which websites are most likely to have the information that the searcher is looking for.

RSS - Is the acronym used to describe the de facto standard for the syndication of Web content. RSS is an XML -based format and while it can be used in different ways for content distribution, its most widespread usage is in distributing news headlines on the Web. A Web site that wants to allow other sites to publish some of its content creates an RSS document and registers the document with an RSS publisher. A user that can read RSS-distributed content can use the content on a different site. Syndicated content can include data such as news feeds, events listings, news stories, headlines, project updates, excerpts from discussion forums or even corporate information.