1 Introduction 

Web Technologies, particularly the Internet, have become an important part of the business 

world over the past few years. People have become accustomed to searching the Internet for 

data, sending e mails, or making simple purchases electronically. Web browsers, such as 

Microsoft's Internet Explorer, or Netscape's Navigator, played an important part in the rapid 

development of the Internet. Designed to present a simple and easy to operate front end 

interface to the user, Web browsers are today's standard way of accessing the vast amount of 

information available through the Internet. 

More recently, with more and more people being connected and the steadily increasing 

connection speed to the Internet, a new wave of more sophisticated web applications emerged. 

In order to make these applications possible, the browser's original functionality of  browsing , 

i.e. navigating through the contents of web sites via hyperlinks, needed to be extended 

significantly.  Scripting languages, such as VBScript or JavaScript, Java enabled browsers, 

DHTML, or XML are some of the technologies that are part of today's browsers to provide the 

means for the development of real world applications such as on line bookstores, on line travel 

agencies, or banking services, which are some of the most well known examples for modern 

Web usage. The technologies mentioned above served to enhance the mostly  static  contents 

(e.g. text or images) of Web pages with  dynamic  elements, such as event handling for error 

checking of forms prior to submittal, or performing of calculations. But not only browsers needed 

to be improved. More importantly, Web servers needed to be able to respond to client requests 

in a more flexible way than presenting the same content to all users. Server side programming 

is the key technology that allows developers to make Web applications fit for a specific purpose, 

so incoming requests can be processed by the server on the fly (e.g. presenting filtered 

information of a database according to search criteria provided by the client). 

Server side programming is today's way of choice to develop Web applications. A Web server 

can be completely controlled by the application provider, eliminating uncertainties regarding the 

capabilities of the client's Web browser. With server side programming, Web pages are 

prepared by the application considering the client's request. This preparation happens on the 

server, so that the information submitted to the client can be in HTML format, the Internet's 

basic, standardized language of communication. 

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