This module intends to teach you the working of the web frontend in very few lessons. In order to get the proper setting, we shall move a bit outside the pure frontend. This influences some of the tool chain. For backend and frontend the important languages are, respectively:
- PHP, an acronym for PHP Home Pages, a server side programming language
- JavaScript, a client side programming language
As an introduction I outline the World Wide Web architecture and place the course disciplines in a wider context. The aim is to get a high altitude perspective of your coming work for the programme. You may choose to look at C/S from a Backend/PHP perspective. Then again you may prefer, and this is our common topic, to look at it from the frontend side. This means an HTML/CSS/JavaScript angle.
Figur 2. Three tier client/server
Please notice that here, too, the file system is local to the web server, and the database location is on principle transparent. This means we do not know where it is located. It is referenced through it's URI (URL). In our development environment, all three (two) tiers are installed on our own development computer, normally our laptop.
Though not strictly necessary for a browser to present html pages to a user, we do need a web server to serve them in real life. On top of that the backend processing is done in conjunction with the web server, as you seen illustrated by PHP in the figures above. The frontend this day and age also has a capability of requesting content through JavaScript, as in AJaX. For this purpose, I require you to install a 3-tier client/server environment. Please refer to Appendix A, Setting Up 3 Tier Client Server Environment for that.
I have a natural scepticism against behemoths. Find yourself a relatively simple editor with color coding for html, etc., and get used to that. That said I currently recommend jEdit. Multi purpose and available for all platforms.
jEdit is downloaded from http://www.jedit.org/index.php?page=download . Pick the proper download according to your platform.
jEdit has a million plugins. Some may be useful. Click Plugins->Plugin manager->, then Install. There are several little helpers for JavaScript programmers. Do experiment, that is the way to learn.