Languages and Frameworks 

What is a website and how it's developed? 

Ultimately, while a great looking website with an attractive design at the front end, bundled with a lot of codes and scripts at the backend. The website is developed or written in codes and scripts using one or more computer programming languages at the core. And these languages formed scripts require platforms and servers to run it. 

There are so many different types of programming languages available. All these multiple programming languages are used to control the actions of a machine, out of which many are popular ones(PHP,JavaScript,Java,Python, Ruby, and etc)

Popular Web Languages

Web development is all about communication and data exchange between the Client and Server. 

While The Server is responsible for serving the web pages depending on the client/end user requirement, A client requests pages from the server and displays them to the end user in a web browser.

Therefore, A Programming language is divided into two main categories that are Client-Side and Server-Side Programming Languages. 

What is Server-side Programming Language?

Server-side Program directly runs on the servers or deal with databases to provide the dynamic results or contents. 

What are the Popular Server-side Languages?

There are several languages that can be used for server-side programming, popular ones are:

1. PHP
2. ASP.NET (C# OR Visual Basic)
3. Java and JSP
4. Python
5. Ruby on Rails and so on.

PHP

PHP stands for PHP Hypertext Processor and is a popular programming language around the world and the latest PHP 7 release made this server-side programming language better and stable than ever. 

This script is mainly designed to simplify dynamic web development easier and better. PHP is widely used in various major projects like Facebook. WordPress uses PHP to power its internals, WordPress users are 26% of the web and currently, PHP itself powers more than 82% of websites.

PHP is made available and supported on almost all major operating systems, including Linux, many Unix variants (including HP-UX, Solaris, and OpenBSD), Microsoft Windows, macOS, RISC OS, and probably others.  Some of the PHP frameworks available such as CakePHP, CodeIgniter, Laravel, Symfony, Yii, and Zend.

CakePHP 

CakePHP is a recent framework that includes excellent features including Builds are quick, great security, Friendly License and etc. With modern PHP 7, it offers a flexible database access layer and a powerful scaffolding system that makes building both small and complex systems simpler, easier. 

CodeIgniter

Codeigniter is the easiest framework to start with comparing to symphony and zend. It's the best option for beginners as it's Easy to learn, Simple, Lightweight and etc. However, it's not the best option for big websites with many features as it does not have authorization and authentication at its core, Not supports ORM, No model, view and controller generators, No ajax helper and so on.

Laravel

Laravel is a free, open-source PHP web framework is widely known for its incredible features like simple Authorization Technique, has Object Oriented libraries and many other pre-installed ones, offers a build in a tool named as Artisan, supports MVC Architecture like Symfony, ensures great security within its framework, easy database migrations, and etc. 

Symfony

Symfony is designed to create scalable, high-performance applications. Symfony is a set of reusable PHP components, With 30 components to choose from which, it ensures the freedom to experiment and work in a RAD environment. Symfony  APIs give easy integration with third-party applications, and thus it widely used in popular front-end frameworks, such as AngularJS.

Many popular CMS like Drupal and phpBB, use a Symfony framework. Symfony ranked 3rd in popularity after Laravel and CodeIgniter.

Yii

Yii is a PHP framework featured with a secure, fast, high-performance application/web-development framework. It is Created by Qiang Xue in 2008.

Zend

Zend PHP Framework is an open-source, purely object-oriented web application framework for PHP 5. Zend was created by Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski

This is not an option if you're looking for an enterprise framework. However, Zend framework includes a collection of PHP packages that can be used to develop web applications. 

ASP.NET

ASP.NET is a Microsoft framework one of the most popular enterprise-level frameworks used as the server-side scripting language. It supports and mainly works on Windows platform. It supports multiple programming languages simultaneously for one web development project. Therefore, the same application can be built with both C# and C++, via CLI (common language interface). The recent ASP.NET 5, is now open to non-Windows platforms for the first time.

Java 

Java is a widely known server-side programming language which is popular for enterprise-level applications, the best option for high-traffic websites that need room to grow. White Java is a programming language, it's much more than just a language—it’s the sum of many tools, known as The Java Platform includes libraries, frameworks, APIs, the Java Runtime Environment, Java plug-ins, and Java’s Virtual Machine (JVM). 

Python

Python is another popular server-side scripting language. With fewer lines of code, the Python programming language is fast and thus it's been mainly used among beginners. It’s one of the powerful oldest of the scripting languages, works well in object-oriented designs.

Ruby

Ruby is another server scripting language which is an excellent option for complicated logic on the database side of your site. Ruby is used for database functionality that PHP and SQL can offer as a pair—it’s great for startups, easy maintenance, and high-traffic demands.

What is Client-side Programming Language?

Client-side programming mostly deals with the user interface with which the user interacts in the web(browser). On the browser side- the scripting languages are used to run this code like JavaScript (or we can use Flash instead of JavaScript or VBScript).

What are the Popular Client-side Languages?

There are many client-side scripting languages available, popular ones are:

1. JavaScript
2. VBScript
3. HTML (Structure)
4. CSS (Designing)
5. AJAX
6. jQuery etc.

HTML and CSS:

JS - JavaScript

• Node.js is the popular server-side JavaScript
• Bootstrap is the most popular HTML, CSS, and JavaScript framework for developing responsive, mobile-first websites
• Express.js, is the popular Node.js-based web application framework
• Angular.js, a popular web application framework used best option for for data-heavy sites
• AJAX (JavaScript + XML)— is designed for creating fast and dynamic web pages which is used to update asynchronously by exchanging small amounts of data with the server behind the scenes.
• MongoDB, is the worldwide used popular NoSQL database.

How to Choose a Programming Language?

Factors to be considered when choosing a programming language

Since there are so many different types of programming languages available, it can be difficult to select which a particular language, how no worries there are certain factors to be considered to choose the language, let's see some:

• Targeted platform – While, not all the languages are compatible with all kinds of platforms, you need to decide on the platform to run your program. For example, a program written in C language requires compilers to run on Windows and Linux based systems.
• Efficiency – You need to choose the efficient compilers of a language to make the language perform fast.
• Make a popular Choice of Programming Language - The website needs to be hosted on some hosting server in order to launch it online. Therefore remember, not all web hosting providers support all programming languages. Therefore, If you are using the more popular options like JavaScript or PHP, you can easily find the web host that fully supports your websites and applications.
• Do not prefer less-commonly used option- If you opt for a less-commonly used option like ColdFusion, you will have fewer options to choose the hosting provider. It may lead to finding the web hosting provider even tougher.