The CGI-Bin is where programs
written to create web pages are placed. These programs can be
written in any programming language. The Web server will then
interact directly with the CGI programs passing any parameters to
CGI program called from a Web page. With CGI you can write
programs in the language most suited to them such as C++ for
speed or Perl. CGI unfortunately does not manage individual users
for you.
ASP is a
Microsoft product which uses VBScript code embedded in the page
to write directly to the page. Thus changing it and making the
page dynamic. ASP like most sophisticated server side languages
provides facilities for separating individual users from each
other seamlessly. ASP programmers can use
Javascript instead of VBScript.
ASP.Net
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AFP
A product developed in the last few years which uses the Visual Fox
Pro Language and database to create dynamic web pages. The code
is embedded in much the same way as VBScript is in ASP with the
same tags <% and %>. The strength of this language is VFP
itself which has large database support and boasts the fastest
data access of any data base language.
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Microsoft Front Page
Microsoft Front Page is a web
page development program with a GUI (Graphical User Interface)
like Dream weaver. Unlike Dream weaver when creating your web page
you can embed commands in the page which will be executed by the
server (or more precisely something called a web bot). These
commands are for things which are commonly needed by web
developers such as Form validation, Web counters, banner adds
etc. It is not designed to let you create your own programs and
so is very inflexible. The main strength is its extreme ease of
use in creating simple dynamic content. It is also a very good
GUI program without the web bot or dynamic content. This can
always be added later with asp etc.
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PERL
Perl was created by Larry Wall on
the Unix platform. Today it is found on most platforms. Perl like
most of the languages used in dynamic web page creation is
interpretive. Perl has incredible regular expression capabilities
making it useful for parsing and extracting information from
large files. Its most prevalent use on the internet is in CGI bin
programs.
Perl for Linux
Perl scripting is available by default on
our Linux hosting packages. You may need to modify your .htaccess file
in order for this script to work.
Perl on Windows
While Perl scripting support is available on our Windows hosting packages. Please be
aware of the limitations that are available. If you are going to make extensive use
of Perl scripting then you will need to take up a Freedom hosting package.
The freedom package is currently hosted on our FreeBSD (Linux) based web servers.
At the point of this writing this is the only package hosted on Linux.
It is possible to have your Perl scripts operational on Windows but you need to
avoid using Linux specific routines.
If you are looking at integrating Perl into your web hosting account please
take to the time to think through for you would like to implement this. Keep an
eye out for any Windows specific information. In all likelihood you will need to
modify your script (at least your configuration) in order for this script to work.
Sendmail and Perl
If your Perl script requires Sendmail to operate then we strongly recommend moving your web
site across to a Freedom hosting package. We have had difficulties in the past
when attempting to get this service to work correctly. Our windows based servers
are designed to use JMail.
Further Notes on Perl for Windows
There are horse for courses which is why we strongly recommend that sticking
with the right server technology for your web server of choice. If you are designing
a web site that uses Linux based technology, great!, stick with it. If you are designing a
web site using Microsoft tech, fabulous, stick with it!.
Also note that you may have to contact us to
add execute permissions on your script and/or script directory. Perl is not a native
module to IIS and parts of the Perl language is executed within the web server's process
while other are executed as a local process. Web site permissions often need to be tweaked.
Perl files end with a .pl or .cgi
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PHP
PHP was developed on the Unix
platform. It follows the basic same philosophy as ASP with all of
the script embedded in the page. The script language is similar
to the Unix Tcsh shell script and Perl with words like echo and
$variable. It shares features with C such as syntax. Due to
being open source there is a lot of functionality with over 700
commands available.
Version and modules available on the acenet servers can be found
here
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Cold Fusion
Cold fusion is designed to increase the productivity of your website development.
Web pages are specific written in cold fusion file format (.cfm files) for
deployment on our web server. This service is included with
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SQL
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MySQL
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Online PDF creation and on-the-fly image
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PostGRESQL
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