Client-Side vs Server-Side Programming Languages

Basic Background

Web development is all about communication and data exchange. This communication takes place via two parties over the HTTP protocol. These parties are:

Server

The Server is responsible for serving the web pages depending on the client/end-user requirement. It can be either static or dynamic.

Client

A client is a party that requests pages from the server and displays them to the end-user. In general a client program is a web browser. Example | Working We can explain this entire mechanism using the following:

• The user opens his web browser (client)
• The user starts browsing
  (for example http://c-sharpcorner.com)
• The client forwards this request to the server, for accessing their web page.
• The server then acknowledges the request and replies back to the client program.
  (An access link to that web page)
• The client then receives the page source and renders it.
  (Into a viewable/under a stable website)
• Now the user types into the search bar
• The client then submits data to the server
• The server processes the data and replies back with a related search result
• The client again renders it back for the user's view
• The user gets access to the requested link.

Server-side Programming

Server-side programming can be explained as: It is the general name for the kind of program that runs directly on the server. Or we can say that server-side programming must deal with dynamic content. It runs on the server. Most web pages are not static since they deal with searching databases.

Server-side Uses

• It processes the user input
• Displays the requested pages
• Structure of web applications
• Interaction with servers/storages
• Interaction with databases
• Querying the database
• Encoding of data into HTML
• Operations over databases like delete, update.

• PHP
• ASP.NET (C# OR Visual Basic)
• C++
• Java and JSP
• Python
• Ruby on Rails and so on.