Hello,
After a bit of basic advice please. What web development languages are available and what are the advantages of each? If this is too basic a question, can someone please signpost so i may research this.
I ask as I have a couple of websites that i need to develop but new to programming and i dont want to make a basic mistake when i contract the work out.
One website is essentially a shop where people can buy things, where i can add my own stock/invoice/count stock/search items etc.
The second website is more complicated - a recruitment website for day to day work with invoicing features etc.
PHP is for the server side logic. Javascript is generally used for browser side logic in web applications. Javascript will not (and should not) replace PHP on the server side now or in the future.
It's already replacing. Just look at node.js and a boom of js webframeworks: javascript modules.
And well... I'm personally going to write my next intranet application with node.js.
Not in my opinion or the opinion of most web application developers. Most all server side application logic is in PHP (or PERL or ASP) or other server side language.
You might find a few developers here or there who are so into JS that they develop server side logic with JS; but most people do not develop server side logic in JS; but instead, use JS for browser side applications (the same as our The UNIX and Linux Forums - Learn UNIX and Linux from Experts site).
Most websites are built with PHP on the server side and JS as the browser side logic which is delivered by a PHP engine.
.. and since LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) is by far the largest platform for delivering web applications, it should be obvious to anyone who develops web applications or administers a web site that PHP is the server side language of choice.
Check out CNN, the NYTimes, Wikipedia, etc etc. Most are written with at type of WordPress framework developed with PHP as the server side language and JS as the browser side language.
Also, my replies are not about "what language is best" .. I am discussing what is used the most across the Internet, and the biggest server/hosting side for for web application development is PHP based.
Go download WordPress (for example)... it is in PHP (server side) and JS (browser side), because this is the standard used by the largest communities on the web. Ditto for forums (written mostly in PHP for the back end).
And yes, of course, PHP is now the champion. But we will see... Anyway every web programmer needs good knowledge of Javascript.
And about ready solutions - yes, it's simpler and better to use them. But the question was about language. I think it was about Ruby, or Python, or something like in mind.
I think for most people who are getting started in web development, it is best to focus on a something like Word Press, written in PHP (with CSS, JS etc), where hundreds, maybe thousands, plugins are available.
It is much easiler to build an e-commerce shopping cart or recruitment site (as the original poster requested) with Word Press and if the developer wants to go deeper they can easily write PHP, JS, CSS extensions.
Word Press is an amazing free applications with myriad extensions for functionality and themes for the presentation layer. It is best not to reinvent the wheel and to learn by modifying existing code rather than starting from zero. I build a lot of WP sites for friends and all of them are very happy with them. A few go further and actually learn basic HTML, CSS and then on to PHP and JS. All are amazed at the power of WP for a web site.
So, just because someone asked about "language" does not mean we ignore the obvious frameworks and do not share our experiences with actual web development.
As a side note, we recently started a thread/poll asking who on the site actually develops or administers a web site. It is one thing to "talk about it" and another to actually "do it".... folks who actually "do it" tend to use CMS frameworks like WordPress and modify as required. Very few start from scratch.
Many thanks for all the replies. Just to clarify, with limited understanding of all the above:
What seems to be the general opinion is for php to be used server side and for js as browser side. However, it seems it is possibly more time efficient to use an application (which has made good use of these web development languages with ready made functions) and then to change/add any neccessary coding, dependent on requirements of the job or limitations of these applications with pre-built functions. Have i got that right in my head?
So i suppose when it comes to contracting any work out and finding a developer, i would need to check they have experience in applications that make use of PHP/JS (such as wordpress), but then are capable enough to write raw code in PHP/JS should i need my website to do something specific that wordpress can not offer. Have i got this right in my mind?
Also other than what we have been discussing above, can you please advise if i should be asking something else when it comes to choosing someone to work with on website development? Other than the obvious such as having a good rapport!
Many developers will try to steer you away from solutions like WordPress because they want to make more money coding from scratch or from their own templates and libraries. Others might provide a WP type of solution but try to charge you for a bunch of work they did not actually do themselves.
If you don't have any experience developing web sites; it will be hard for you to choose a developer because you don't have enough knowledge or experience to evaluate their proposal, or to even write a proposal. Also, we have no knowledge of your requirements, your budget, your company, your overall experience; so providing further advise is like try to fire a bullet at a moving target.
I think you have a lot of research and learning to do.....
Maybe... but I have never had a problem with WP and I actually manage a number of web sites that use WP. Memory and CPU cycles are cheap.
Many say Apache is also a "memory and CPU hog" but it does not stop the majority of web admins in the world from using Apache versus another web server
Not cheap enough. I use apache all the time on not all that new hardware, properly tuned it works.
I have a home server that hosts various things for myself and friends. It wasn't much but it happily ran multiple different websites/forums/wiki via Apache, some MMO, a bunch of databases, some file storage, folding@home, and much more besides.
When one of my hosted sites wanted to move to wordpress, I needed to upgrade the memory fourfold, the CPU several generations, to accommodate one instance.
There exists tutorials and mods all over the internet for making Wordpress less of a burden, I'm skeptical they'd exist if it didn't waste resources.
The amount of memory and CPU required for any additional "memory and CPU" requirement for a WP site costs, on a per monthly basis, less than 25% of a single hour for a web developer.
I won't mince words either
Most people who use WP do it for a reason and I think the users who are using WP from the over 5 million downloads of version 3.2 speak more accurately than the opinion of a user unhappy with his experience on a home server.
Memory is cheap. Very cheap. So is CPU. The CNN web site is run on a Wordpress core...... and I am sure those guys know what they are doing
I'm not saying "hire a web developer", I'm saying "wordpress is a pig". Surely there must be better alternatives.
The wordpress site I host didn't do so "for a reason", they did it to jump on the bandwagon.
It's even a bandwidth pig. 300 kilobytes of data transfer on a webpage. That doesn't include the images it loads, just the raw text of the main webpage. That doesn't make for efficient use of hosting resources.
Imagine how much more you could do with a web host if it didn't have to support wordpress.
Having made my point, I'll retire from this argument.
Just look at node.js and a boom of js webframeworks: 
I use apache all the time on not all that new hardware, properly tuned it works.