Server-Side Scripting Overview

This section provides an overview of the Web server-side scripting process flow. The Web server removes the script code and executes it.

Server-side scripting happens in step 4 as shown in the diagram below:

Server-Side Scripting Flow
Server-Side Scripting Flow

Step 1: The user enters a new Web page address or clicks a link that requires a new Web page from the Web server.

Step 2: The Web browser connects the Web server and sends a HTTP GET command with the path name of the requested Web page.

Step 3: The Web server fetches the HTML document of the requested page or asks an application server to generate the HTML document.

Step 4: The Server-side scripting step: The Web server scans the HTML document for any server-side script code embedded in the document. The Web server will remove the embedded script code and execute it.

When the Web server executes the embedded script code, it will provide many host objects representing the server host environment. Through those host objects, server-side script code can easily access the carrying HTML document, the server filesystem, any databases, and networked computers.

Usually, server-side script code will update the carrying HTML document with dynamic data resulted from its computations.

At the end of the server-side script process step, the updated HTML document is ready to be sent back the client - the Web browser.

Table of Contents

 About This Book

 Introduction to JavaScript

 ECMAScript Language Specification and JavaScript Dialects

 Data Types, Variables and Expressions

 Flow Control Statements

 Creating, Accessing, and Manipulating Arrays

 Defining and Calling Functions

 Web Browser Supporting JavaScript

Server-Side and Client-Side Web Scripting

 Web Scripting Architecture Overview

Server-Side Scripting Overview

 Client-Side Scripts for Document Updating

 Client-Side Scripts for Event Handling

 Client-Side Scripting Processed Multiple Times

 New Script Resulted from Two Original Scripts

 Introduction to Objects

 Defining Your Own Object Types

 Inheritance of Properties and Methods through the Prototype Object Chain

 'jrunscript' - JavaScript Shell Command from JDK

 Using Functions as "Function" Objects

 Introduction to Built-in Object Types

 W3C's Document Object Model (DOM) Specifications

 AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript And XML)

 References

 Full Version in PDF/EPUB