Demystifying Web Developer Terminologies

The entire process of creating websites involves quite a number of skills and various technologies that work together to produce a final desired product. It is not uncommon to find web developers who also couple up as designers but it also commonplace to find practitioners who prefer and are well versed in web development. So then the question becomes, who is a web developer. This particular group of people are more of computer programmers than graphic designers. They write the code which is interpreted by a server where the website is hosted, and this interpretation results in the display of a page on the browser.

In order to fully understand the process, one needs to grasp the concept of web hosting and domain names. Every website is composed of a group of interlinked pages that work together by exchanging information. This website has to be stored on a computer which is connected to the internet at all times. It is this computer or storage space that is referred to as the hosting space. For internet users to access a particular website, a link pointing to the location of the site on the host, needs to be provided, and this link is referred to as the Domain name. It is this name which is typed on the web browser resulting in the display of a desired page, e.g. http://www.mysite.com.

For most websites to work, they need to collect and store data for future use. For this purpose, web developers use database systems like MySQL and Oracle. These systems store information using tables, in a way that is easy to access and manipulate. For a web page to interact with the database another technology has to be used, most commonly, the PHP scripting language. Among other thing, this language allows data captured from a web page to be transferred, stored, manipulated, accessed and displayed using various database systems. However, unlike HTML, PHP cannot be interpreted by a web browser and requires the use of special software called a server. This software always installed on the hosting space and is often referred to as the Hosting Server. Other technologies such as AJAX also allow the exchange of data, to and from a database system, without affecting the actual appearance of the web page.

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