Nuts & Bolts

Warning: Extremely Geeky Content Ahead! Please exercise caution! Those pregnant, having heart conditions, or traveling with small children should probably turn back now!

There are many elements that go into the delivery of dynamic Web content and a number of options that affect the capabilities and cost structure of building and maintaining a Web site. These pieces generally fulfill one of the following functions:

A Server platform to serve the Web site, which lives on an Operating System on a computer.
A Database to store data for the Web site.
A Programming Language to provide functionality and work with the database.
Front-end Markup and Content delivered to the end user's browser.
A browser used to send requests, render content and navigate the Web.

Here's a list of these with explanations of their function and our choice for each piece.

Server Operating System. This is just like the operating system on your personal computer. However, it generally has a certain specialized set of components and services in order to fulfill its role as a server and lacks lots of other components and services you might expect on your personal computer in order to keep overhead low, maximize performance and enhance security. Servers have the same basic components as your personal computer in terms of hardware (CPU, Memory, Hard Drives), but these components are generally very specific to what they need to do and where they live (in rooms filled to the brim with other servers all spitting out lots of heat).

Linux: Used in all sizes of operations, from large Web Hosting companies to small to medium operations. This is the most common choice of Web Hosting operating system on the mainstream Internet. Google uses a special in-house Linux installation on most if not all of their purportedly hundreds of thousands of servers worldwide.

Web Server. This is a program that runs on the server (just like Microsoft Word/Firefox/Photoshop), only it's probably on all the time (24/7/365). It accepts requests for Web sites from end users, processes those requests according to its configuration(s) and then serves the Web site content back to the end user after whatever processing is necessary.

Apache: Built by a collaboration of government and university engineers under the Apache Foundation umbrella, Apache is the most commonly used Web server software and is compatible with most Operating Systems.

Database System. This is used to store and organize anywhere from a few rows to a few billion rows of data. It's like a really fancy spreadsheet, but generally only responds to commands formatted in the standardized SQL (Structured Query Language) format and is also on 24/7/365. There are hundreds of database software options for any scenario.

MySQL: Developed initially by the MySQL community, MySQL was recently purchased by Oracle software. Although generally thought of for small to medium applications, in its clustered configuration it serves tens of millions of Facebook users 24/7/365.

Programming Language. This is the brains of a Web site. Programs - written in programming languages - generally consist of a set of instructions entered by a programmer. In the Web space, they are generally used to format data, see whether a user is logged in, connect to a database system or systems, calculate the time of day, the distance to Houston, the velocity of an airborne swallow, or any number of billions of other possible uses. Programming languages generally all do the same things. Cost, flexibility, speed to deploy, enterprise support and stability are among the factors that determine choice in this area.

PHP: Initially developed as a college project in Scandinavia, now maintained by dozens of volunteers from around the globe. Completely free and extremely popular, Web giants such as Facebook have been built with PHP.

Front-end Content and Markup. These pieces all fit together to create the actual Web site the end user sees in their browser. Almost all are universal, completely free and open-source and used by anyone who builds sites. After all the processing is done, the Web server will spit out an HTML page to the end user with no trace of what was used to put it together. A plain text file at its core, that HTML page will contain references to images, CSS, videos and many other things that the browser will then also request from the Web server.

HTML: The "Lingua Franca" of the Web and the seed of the Internet explosion. This is the markup language that tells a browser whether a piece of content is an image, a paragraph, a table or a link to another Web page. It has gone through many different versions and iterations. Standardization of HTML and its close relatives is a constant source of committees and turmoil around the world. However, nothing on the Internet would exist without this piece of the pie.
CSS: Cascading Style Sheets are text-based objects that fit together with HTML and have significantly improved the creativity and performance of the Internet with their universal standardization, ease of use and tremendous flexibility. They contain formatting instructions for the browser. Example in plain English: "The box named 'myBlueBox' on any page should have a light blue background, a 2 pixel dark blue border, white text and 10 pixels of padding between the border and the contents."
JavaScript: A browser-side language that gives interactivity and certain other benefits to otherwise flat pages.
Flash: Highly interactive components that deal with non-flat browser-side content such as videos, games and animations and are sometimes used to supplant HTML pages almost entirely. Flash is an Adobe Software product.

Browsers. At the beginning and end of the entire supply chain is a browser. Once the source of a heated business war between Netscape and Microsoft, browsers have become ubiquitous and almost all are entirely free. Recent changes to the set of available browsers have helped to bring new features and ease of use to end users, as well as oust Internet Explorer's near-monopoly of the user base with healthy competition. Regardless of which you use, the Web should be accessible to you. Their job is to render and serve HTML-based Web content.

Firefox: A very popular open-source option developed by the Mozilla Foundation, Firefox is the daily browser for most Web developers because of its almost mission critical set of plug-ins and add-ons. It's what we use, but your site will work in whatever you and your users want to use. That's one of the little details of service we provide.

Too much information? Too many choices? It's all Greek to you? Worry about This Stuff and be glad that we're here to make sense of it all for you.