Subtitles of the Movie

Lets take a look now at perl in context. Most likely the reason that you want to learn perl is to use it for the World Wide Web. And that's why, that's the focus of this course. Perl in the context of the web. Lets take a look first of all at what perl actually does, in the context of the web. I think it's important first of all, that we draw a distinction between client side and server side technologies. The client in this case is the user's computer, that could be their web browser, and the server would be the machine that actually serves the data to the users browsing the web. Now client side technologies typically takes place within the browser. So everything that they do happens on the user's machine. Some examples of client side technologies would be Java Script, Java Applets, and MacroMedia Flash. Now these are all very different technologies that do different things. But the common thread between each of them is that they all do things on the user's computer, and within their browser. So although Java Script is able to change what you see on your browser window, and MacroMedia Flash is able to do most amazing animation within your browser, it's not actually taking place on the server, and the content all has to be loaded to the browser, on to the flash movie or the Java Applets, before it can show to the user. If it wants to get anything else, it has to make a request to the server. And that's where server side technologies come in. Server side scripting all takes place on the server itself. Some examples of server side technologies would be perl, PHP, JSP (which stands for Java Server Pages), Coldfusion and ASP (Microsoft's Active Server Pages). Once again there are some differences between each of these technologies, and they all are good at some things and perhaps not so good for others. However the common thread that runs between each of these, is that they are all server side scripting languages. So their main job is to handle dynamic content and serve it to the user.