Although web development is at the center of any online business, most of us go on our daily routine without realizing what exactly goes on in the web development world. Ever wonder what goes on behind the scenes to create the backbone of Lawline.com? Hopefully I can help shed some light on the basics to these questions.
We’ll start with Web 2.0.
We have all heard a term Web 2.0 I’m sure… But what does it really mean?
In plain, it stands for the “new age” internet technologies which are powering and making a revolution on the internet lately. Web 2.0 stands for a sort of a web development culture and certain technologies which encompass it for the most part, which I will briefly describe below and in short explain how they are used on Lawline.com website. We at Lawline are always striving towards innovation and we were pioneering Web 2.0 ever since the beginning of our company which also coincided with Web 2.0 emerging as a preferred web development standard.
Web 2.0 sites which are the most popular would be: facebook, twitter, google, flikr, etc.
✓ HTML: HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is the basic markup language that describes Web pages. It’s a relatively simple technique for building Web sites that requires nothing but a plain text editor. HTML contains text, images and other tags which comprise tables, layout and fonts etc. Browsers read HTML in order to display the desired result. you may see HTML of the page you are browsing by clicking CTRL+U in Mozilla to see an example.
✓ XHTML: XHTML is often considered the successor to HTML. 
Because it doesn’t allow certain kinds of tags, XHTML is actually a smaller language that’s a bit easier to use. Typically XHTML pages are more dependent on CSS than HTML, as many of the HTML tags are replaced with CSS tools. XHTML is a “new age” HTML and has a lot of extra cool features and is very enthusiastically standardized and supported by all internet browsers and mobile devices.
✓ CSS: CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is a way to add specific style information to an HTML or XHTML page. HTML and XHTML provide the general framework, and CSS describes the color and layout. HTML uses CSS files in order to separate layout and style code from the HTML code itself
✓ JavaScript: JavaScript is a programming language embedded in all modern Web browsers. It’s specially designed to interact with Web pages; you can use it to extract information from parts of a page, and to manipulate the page in real time. Javascript runs primarily on the browser and thus uses clients resources and not our servers.
✓ AJAX: (Asynchronous JavaScript And XML) is a technique that allows JavaScript to communicate more directly with the Web server. It creates an interesting new relationship between the Web browser and the Web server. This allows me to make page requests in the background without refreshing the parent page. Notes in the CRM is an example, which is used in order to change notes and or statuses. If you notice, the main page does not reload and thus saves you time and our servers processing power.
✓ PHP: (PHP Hypertext Preprocessor) is one of several important languages for working on a Web server. Our sites are all written exclusively in PHP. It handles the requests from the user and produces the response to the browser encoded in HTML language which then the browser displays to the user. In the backgroud, PHP may use databases, files, or other internet services in order to generate the desired output to the browser. It uses an Object Oriented approach where business logic of the program is abstracted into logical structure
resembling “containers” of logically grouped functionality. In the end this serves for better organized code and makes it easier to later add features and change the existing ones. This is opposed to non Object Oriented approach, which can be compared to a written text file that is executed line by line- a process called the Procedural Approach. Its the thing of the past.
✓ MySQL is an open source (meaning free) database engine to manage your databases. A database is a structured collection of data. It may be anything from a simple shopping list to a picture gallery or the vast amounts of information in a corporate network. To add, access, and process data stored in a computer database, you need a database management system such as MySQL Server. Since computers are very good at handling large amounts of data, database management systems play a central role in computing, as standalone utilities, or as parts of other applications.
✓ jQuery: jQuery is a fast and concise JavaScript Library that simplifies HTML document traversing, event handling, animating, and Ajax interactions for rapid web development. jQuery is designed to change the 
way that you write JavaScript. We are using jQuery very extensively since it allows for all the cool effects you see on our site ( for example the Course Center or login popup box). Last week jQuery Mobile ver. 1 came out, and we are already in the works making a mobile Lawline.com site which will resemble a native iPhone Apllication in its looks and functionality and will support Video Streaming on iPhone with all our course center features.
This will make us the first ones in the industry to have such a thing.
This will be exciting month!!!
