Post 2: Back-End Technology, HTML5 Form

In the last class of Project Management, we reviewed the four necessary parts in developing a website, but we mainly focused on the strategy and the requirements of building a Contentment Management System (CMS), the four parts are:

  • Front End (Interface)
  • Back End (Server-Side Language with DataBase)
  • Content
  • Strategy

In my team, my role is in dealing with the back end section regarding redesign and build the hospital website, and this gave me the responsibility to explain all the details about this part of the site development. As web developers, we know that there are many server-side programming languages, but the most commonly used are PHP and ASP.NET with C#. That’s why these two languages are being taught in Post Graduate Web Development Program at Humber College. Although I have a tendency to build the back-end of the hospital website using PHP and MySQL in the next semester, I have to explain my part in back end using ASP.NET. The reason why I prefer PHP is because it’s an open source technology, used in WordPress and Drupal CMSs, and supported by most web hosting companies. I am listening here two links that might be useful:

Since we covered ASP.NET in details in the first semester my job is to estimate the time we need to build the website using this technology in order to estimate the budget for the back end. Fortunately, we have a final ASP.NET project which to build a database driven website that let the admin users log in to change or edit the database and public web pages to let any user view or retrieve these information from the database. This project demonstrates the idea of using CMS, so upon finishing this project I will have a better idea about the time I need to spend in order to build a similar website plus a clear understanding about what kind of difficulties or struggles I might face in building a website using ASP.NET.

To add my last opinion, learning ASP.NET beside PHP is important for someone who is looking for a job mainly as back-end developer. There is no doubt that a candidate will have better opportunities in finding a job in this competitive field because there are many web developers that use PHP but there are few who use ASP.NET, for more details visit “Web Technology Survey”.

In web programming class, we worked on HTML5 Form and we discussed most of its advanced features. The new attributes that have been added to HTML5 form and the form validation enhanced the accessibility of using the form in different devices. The drawbacks of using these new features they are not fully supported by all browsers, for more details, you visit “Can I use”.

Anyhow, these restrictions will not stop me from using these new tags or attributes to prepare myself for the coming up to date technology, for more details visit “HTML5 Form Attributes (W3 School)”. To be on the safe side, JavaScript and Server-Side form validation are both needed to overcome the problem with old browsers that don’t support HTML5 form validation, and the other important reason is that JavaScript could be disabled in the user browser which leads to some security issues and that’s why server-side validation is also required.