Server-Side Scripting

web

Definition

Server-Side Scripting

Server-side scripting produces a dynamic site: a page whose content depends on data in the incoming HTTP request. Any programming language can run on the server side, though PHP remains the most widely deployed, followed by Ruby, Java, JavaScript, Python, and others.

Typical responsibilities are session management, database interaction, dynamic HTML generation, and API serving. Web frameworks (Flask, Django, Laravel, Express, Spring, etc.) wrap a language to ease development.

Example

PHP echo page

PHP mixes HTML and code; variables start with $, $_GET is a superglobal associative array holding the query string.

<?php
$userName = htmlspecialchars($_GET["name"]);
echo "<h1>Hello " . $userName . "!</h1>";
?>

Flask echo page

Flask separates HTML and code and escapes template variables by default.

from flask import Flask, render_template
app = Flask(__name__)
 
@app.route("/user/<username>")
def greetings(username):
    return render_template("user.html", name=username)

<!-- templates/user.html -->
<h1>Hello {{ name }}!</h1>