Interactive Web Tehcnologies

Teppo Räisänen

LIIKE/OAMK 2011

General Information

The basic (X)HTML pages are called static pages

By using interactive techniques interactive content can be provided: Order an item from e-shop Control a Web camera Find out about available books in the

library

General Information

Interactivity by itself should not be the goal of design

Design of interactive pages requires more time and effort

The limitations of server/client end must be thought of when designing an interactive Web site

Web Forms

HTML forms look lot like printed out forms

The processing of a HTML form is completed by a computer

Form element is used as an interface between the processing side and the user

Web Forms There are form fields included

inside the form for different pieces and types of information

An address of the processing script is written as a part of form element’s declaration

Scripts are small scaled computer programs

Web Forms

<form method=”post” action=” http://www.myserver.com/cgi-bin/formprocessing.cgi”> <input name=“id" size=“20” /><input type="submit" value=“Send” /></form>

Web Forms The script for processing can

reside in any available server After submitting the form, the

information inside the form is sent for processing

The form data is often ’raw data’ not meant to be analyzed by human resources

Server-side Scripting

A script can include e.g. database search

It is not necessary to know the inside contents of the script but it’s programming interface: Information needed by the script

process Information returned by the process

CGI

= Common Gateway Interface Describes only the interface

between the browsers and the scripts

CGI does not limit the use of programming language

Of the languages Perl is most commonly used

ASP

Active Server Pages Designed for Microsofts server

technologies There are ASP modules available

for e.g. Apache server The most common programming

language for ASP pages is VBScript

PHP

= Hypertext Preprocessor A programming language PHP contains libraries for e.g.

Localising String analyzing, modification Graphics, diagrams