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Let's take a look at some Web Development Basics and I just want to go through some terminology because if you're new to Web Development it can really be like a murky, dark world of confusing acronyms and technologies and it's kind of hard to know how all these fit together. One thing I will tell you, if you're brand new to Web Development do not get discouraged by the amount of seemingly endless technologies you need to know. You will build on these and you don't have to use them all at once. And thanks to programs like the Visual Web Developer and Visual Studio 2008, you don't have to know all of this stuff to be able to use it, OK? Now, let me warn you and let me strongly encourage you. As soon as you can, without putting a whole lot of pressure on yourself you need to learn all these other technologies. You don't have to understand everything about HXTML or AJAX, but the sooner you learn more about it, the better you're going to be, the more comfortable you're going to be and the more functionality you can provide your end users. So, let's just kind of go through some of these terms. The first thing you need to be aware of in a Web Development scenario is the Web server. Now that sounds very simple, but the Web server is where all of our web pages are stored, so we build these web pages, we add functionality to them, we're going to store them on the Web Server so that people can get them. Now the way people get them is they open a browser and they type something like http: whack whack www.something, something, something.com,.org,.net and it connects to our Web Server and begins to request either the default web file, or HTM file, or ASPX file, or they specific ask for one, we'll see that later. Now, the Web server's responsibility is to take whatever page or file was requested by the browser and simply render it, or do some pre-processing on it and send it back to the browser, send it what's called markup language, OK? Now, the Web server can add a number of services to the process of providing these files back and most of what it does is perform sophisticated programming functions. It can connect to a database and pull data and add it to the Web page. It could read information that the browser passed and use that information to query a database for information to pass back. So the Web server is where the files that we're going to show people are stored. The browser, already mentioned it, is the application that is used to pull those files down to the client's machine, so the browser is actually an application that displays web pages. Now a lot of people who are really new to Web Development don't really realize the complexity that is a Web Browser and of course, we're talking about Firefox, Internet Explorer, Google's Chrome, Opera, some of those things - Safari for the Mac Folks - that application is pretty sophisticated. There's a lot going on in the background and we'll talk about some of that as we go through the course here. The Browser's real basic functionality is to read the HTML markup. When I say HTML markup that is the protocol or the markup language that we used on the file that is saved on the Web server and we've had markup there that tells the Browser how to display this, to make certain words larger, bolder, different colors, where to put them on the page and that sort of thing. The Browser reads that HTML markup, shows the file and the user reads it. Now the Browser can also perform a number of functions on the file - we'll get into that a little bit later. CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets, is something that we can use to give us a more precise display and format control on the data that we show in the Browser because regular HTML markup really only told us what size in relation to each other. It didn't give us a whole lot of specifics. Cascading Style Sheets is a way to provide all that in a much more manageable and scalable fashion than just standard HTML. It gives us the change of storing all of our settings for how we want the Web page to look in one external file and have every page point to that, so then when we want to make a change we just change that one page and everybody gets it. Next technology you're going to hear about is JavaScript and this is called client-side scripting. Now what that means is, is that we can program or we can put some programming, some scripting programming using JavaScript or JScript, or some other things, but usually you're going to see JavaScript uses the standard and we will actually write that into our Web page. But what happens is, it will access functions in the browser and it will do certain things on the client's computer so that the file doesn't have to go back to the Web server and do a functionality and then come back, OK, so, that's what we mean by saying without making another call to the Web server. In other words, when I click on a button it can check to see if my form's all filled out and if I've missed a text box it can warn me, instead of going all the way back to the Server and then me waiting for it to make the round trip again. Now what this does is it accesses certain browser functionalities, it can change colors, it can do some things and to the end user it makes it look dynamic. They filled in a few fields and they clicked on it, instantly it said something to them and it makes it look to them like it's a smart application, but the bottom line, the main thing is it makes the whole surfing the Internet deal feel faster and it is much more efficient for the end user. Anything we can do on the client side without having to crawl back through the Internet to the Web server is what we want to do. Now you will also hear a term here called AJAX. We'll talk about AJAX in the course a little bit later on. Server Side Scripting is just the opposite of what JavaScript does. This is programming we put in the Web page that gets executed on the Web server before the Web page ever leaves and comes to the browser, then it can be programmed and it's executed when we click on something on the Web page and send it back to the browser, so we can have code running on the client side in the browser and then we can have code running on the server side. This adds even more dynamic aspects to the Web and we will look at that later. You can use this, for example, to read and write from the database and that sort of thing and we will concentrate on that. XML, XHTML - these are all various language additions and changes. They're all similar to, or they're based on standard HTML and they simply provide additional functionalities. That's a rough overview of some of the technologies and terms that you're going to hear in Web Development. I will touch on most of these directly as we go through the course here, so know and understand how some of these pieces and parts fit together here.