In fact easy web programming languages are already here right under our noses. Awareness of easy alternatives to popular but more complex systems based on Apache, Perl, PHP, and Ruby and their frameworks is minimal because of marketing forces.

Technology is supposed to make our lives easier but this promise has not been delivered to web developers especially. The page centered way that web applications are created forces programmers to tie many parts together with extra code that isn't needed in traditional (non-web) programming. The complexity of it all scares away the beginners and causes professional developers to be unproductive (and bald).

The popular web development culture advocates programming features like REST capability and stateless pages but these features actually complicate the development process. If you don't know what REST is, or what stateless pages are then you'll appreciate what I'm about to say: You shouldn't need to understand those ideas to create web applications. There are some programming systems which abandon these ideas, and in so doing they make web development simpler and even enjoyable. They also do receive a certain degree of disdain by the "establishment", but for those willing to think outside the box the benefits can be substantial for some kinds of web projects. This article will discuss some of these systems in short.

Seaside, http://www.seaside.st- The Seaside web development framework (also known as the Heretic web framework) is a system which provides almost a complete stack (provide your own database). It includes an HTTP server, automatic application sessions, transparent state management, live development and debugging, Ajax libraries and more.

Seaside developers code in the venerable Smalltalk language to build their applications. With a combination of an easy to use component-style page generation metaphor, support for cascading style sheets, and the powerful expressiveness of Smalltalk the Seaside developer enjoys tremendous productivity.

Seaside is an open source project with a liberal license and is available for both free and commercial Smalltalk platforms.

Run BASIC, http://www.runbasic.com- Run BASIC is a zero configuration web application server that features an extremely easy web development metaphor, suitable for the beginner. In one easy install it provides an HTTP server, automatic application sessions, transparent state management, tightly integrated BASIC programming language, inline CSS capability, graphics library, an XML parser and SQLite database support. Even with all the included functionality, the programmer is not confronted with a lot of complexity because of Run BASIC's built-in easy to use commands.

Run BASIC brings to the web the easy programming that BASIC has historically been known for. It is suitable for personal projects, educational situations, small business apps and more. There is an interactive version of the system hosted at the Run BASIC website so that anyone can try their hand at writing code. Cost: $59.95

Sun Labs Lively Kernel Project, http://research.sun.com/projects/lively- The Lively Kernel project is a web programming system developed at Sun by the inventor of the Smalltalk programming language. It is very cutting edge and very novel. It turns your web browser into a Javascript development environment and it includes a scalable vector graphics based windowing library. While this system may not be appropriate for some commercial websites, it is suitable for online games and educational curricula. Lively Kernel provides a kind of personal laboratory for building very dynamic applications that work in a browser.

Lively Kernel is supported in Safari and Firefox 2 and 3, but Safari is the recommended platform as of the writing of this article. It is licensed under the GPL2.

Are you interested to find out more about the Simple PHP guide, and whether or not it is worth getting? With so many tutorials available on the internet, it can be very confusing trying to put all the information together to study systematically. This article will discuss how this scripting language works in general, and what is contained in the Simple PHP guide.

1. What Exactly Is PHP?

It is a server side scripting language that can be easily combined with HTML tags. It has been reconstructed into a web language today.

2. How Does It Work?

It works like standard programming language whereby it maintains the if/else condition statements, loops and subroutines. It is easily identified by the curly brackets { } used to define the start and end of statements. Users will need to use a

Finally, when you are done scripting a page in PHP, remember to save the file with the extension .php, and remember that .php files can still contain HTML tags within them.

3. Why Should You Learn PHP?

It is the most popular knowledge to have when you want your web pages to handle form data submitted by users. It also allows customization and building of dynamic pages. Best of all, it can connect to any SQL database, allowing you or your users to store, edit and delete any information from your web pages.

4. Review of Simple PHP Guide

This guide is compiled by Robert Plank and it is essentially like a step by step course for learning this scripting language. With the abundance of information available on the internet, it is very confusing to know where to start and end.

5. What Is Contained In This Package?

It lays out all the essential PHP skills in 17 chapters, complete with quizzes at the end of every chapter to test your understanding. 22 useful code snippets are included so you can stick them into your web page and be used immediately. Simple PHP guide is highly recommended if you want a full grasp of this scripting language quickly.

When choosing the best content management system for your project, it is important to weigh both the technical and non-technical pros and cons. Both technical and non-technical reasons can ultimately affect the bottom line cost. Therefore, it is not recommended to simply choose a content management system based solely on technical language or feature set. In this article, we will take a look at an open source content management system called Radiant CMS.

Radiant is a Ruby on Rails based solution that works with a variety of databases. It has a few years of development and a couple noteworthy deployments. There are technical and non-technical reasons why Radiant CMS is a good choice for a content management system.

Technical Reasons to Choose Radiant CMS: It's Ruby on Rails based which can speed development by taking advantage of the convention over configuration paradigm. In addition, the Radiant code base has excellent automated coverage in unit tests. This means the code is well tested and robust. Unit test code coverage can be one aspect to measure when considering open source content management systems. In fact, we could suggest the amount of code covered by automated unit and integration tests should be considered when choosing any open source library and/or framework. It is an easy indicator to measure and compare. But, that is an entirely different conversation.

Radiant CMS also has an excellent extension system. This allows customizations required by your project to be made. When choosing a content management system, the ability to add and maintain any customizations should be an important factor. This point should be considered not only from the beginning, but how your customizations will evolve as upgrades and enhancements occur within your chosen content management system. In other words, if the core CMS is modified to provide the custom functionality, how can upgrades or patches from the core CMS developers be applied to your modified version. Radiant's extension system provides this separation of concern.

The Radius tagging system of Radiant is fantastic for adding dynamic functionality. It is nice that tags can be added directly to page content rather than some kind of comment or special character sequence in order to indicate non-static content.

Non-Technical Reasons to Choose Radiant CMS: Radiant has an elegant, intuitive administrative interface. It is not intimidating to the non-technical user. In fact, the design encourages people to embrace using the system, because they assume it is going to be easy to pick up and learn.

The lack of workflow functionality can be considered a feature in many cases. In competing CMS products, workflow can seem like an attractive feature at first, but is often hindrance to configure and work around for projects which require only a few administrators of content.

An additional, non-technical reason to choose Radiant CMS is cost. The project is open source and the community of ruby on rails developers and ruby on rails hosting providers is growing, so your cost risk of obtaining these resources is minimized.

Conclusion

From a technical perspective, the open source, Ruby on Rails based Radiant CMS makes an excellent choice. From a non-technical perspective, Radiant CMS makes an excellent choice as well. When combining both perspectives, we have had many positive project experiences and deployments using Radiant over the past year and a half.