Ad Blocker Detected
Our website is made possible by displaying online advertisements to our visitors. Please consider supporting us by disabling your ad blocker.
Job control languages and shells, GUI scripting, application-specific languages, text processing languages, general-purpose dynamic languages, and extension or embeddable languages are commonly used for scripting in web development.
Controlled by languages
The job control languages and shells are a major class of scripting languages has grown out of the automation of job control that is related to starting and controlling the behavior of system programs.
What is GUI?
Graphics User Interface (GUI) scripting is a specialized kind of scripting language used for controlling a computer. They are usually used to automate user actions. Furthermore, they are also known as “macros” when control is through simulated key presses or mouse clicks. Their only downside is that their uses are limited because they need support from the GUI application and from the operating system. As an exception, however, some of them are based on recognizing graphical objects from their display screen pixels. These GUI scripting languages do not depend on support from the operating system or application.
What does it do?
Application-specific languages are designed for a single application. They have custom features that separate them from a specific general-purpose language. The text processing languages are one of the oldest scripting languages. Scripts written for the Unix tools AWK, sed, and grep mechanize tasks that involve text files like configuration and log files.
What’s the purpose?
General-purpose dynamic languages are used for broader purposes. The most widespread of them all is Perl which is originally designed to overcome limitations of scripting languages.
The extension or embeddable languages are for replacing application-specific scripting languages. Examples of these languages include JavaScript which began as a language for scripting inside web browsers. Another example is the SpiderMonkey which is embedded in several environments such as the Yahoo! Widget Engine. Tcl was created as an extension language but has become more of a general purpose language especially in roles similar to Python, Perl, and Ruby. Rexx was originally created as a job control language but is widely used as an extension language and a general-purpose language at the same time. Furthermore, these languages are also used in other types of applications that need a faster feature or tweak-and-run cycles like game engines.
Tweaking makes the code work
During web development, this allows tweaking more freely without the need for the user to have a deeper knowledge of the inner workings of the application or to rebuild it after each tweak; having so can take time. Additionally, the most common scripting languages used for this purpose are Lua and Python.
Accordingly, the most widespread scripting language is JavaScript because it is powerful and secure enough and can run as a stand-alone program or an applet embedded in a website. The second most widespread is PHP. Although it may simplify coding for small sites, it still has the possibility to be abused, resulting in difficult management and code maintenance for larger projects. To prevent that, make sure that there is a proper use of a templating system such as Smarty. Additionally, the third most popularly used language is Perl. There’s also full stack ColdFusion developer and development for those who would like to do full scripting and database connectivity.
