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Supported Scripting Languages

All our hosting accounts provide the following scripting languages.

Please note that the only support we offer for these languages is ensuring that they are available and working correctly on all our servers. We do not provide any help with programming errors or debugging issues within your own scripts.

Perl

Short for "Practical Extraction and Report Language", Perl is a programming language developed by Larry Wall, especially designed for processing text. Because of its strong text processing abilities, Perl has become one of the most popular languages for writing CGI scripts. Perl is an interpretive language, which makes it easy to build and test simple programs.

Further details can be found at www.perl.org

PHP4 / PHP5

PHP is an open source, server-side, HTML embedded scripting language used to create dynamic webpages. In an HTML document, PHP script (similar syntax to that of Perl or C) is enclosed within special PHP tags. Because PHP is embedded within tags, the author can jump between HTML and PHP (similar to ASP and Cold Fusion) instead of having to rely on heavy amounts of code to output HTML. And, because PHP is executed on the server, the client cannot view the PHP code. PHP can perform any task that any CGI program can do, but its strength lies in its compatibility with many types of databases.

PHP4 is the older version of PHP and for this reason it has been used to write a great many of the scripts and tools freely available on the internet. PHP5 is an updated version which offers better support for object-oriented programming, but there are also some other differences which could make PHP4 scripts fail if they are executed using PHP5.

For more information about PHP we suggest looking at www.php.net

All hosting accounts with AFS Computing fully support both PHP4 and PHP5. For compatibility with older scripts our servers all default to PHP4, meaning that any scripts with the extension .php will be treated as a PHP4 script. If required you can change this default for your entire site, or if you prefer you can specify the version to use for individual scripts by naming them with a .php4 or .php5 extension.

Python

Python is an interpreted, interactive, object-oriented programming language. It is often compared to Tcl, Perl, Scheme or Java. Python combines remarkable power with very clear syntax. It has modules, classes, exceptions, very high level dynamic data types, and dynamic typing.

Further details can be found at www.python.org

Sun ASP

ASP is an abbreviation for "Active Server Pages". ASP is a Microsoft technology that runs inside Windows 2000 or Windows XP. To run ASP on our Linux servers we have deployed Java System Active Server Pages.

ASP allows the programmer to embed scripting code within HTML pages in much the same way as PHP does. However, in ASP you have a choice of two scripting languages to use within your pages, VBScript or JScript (Microsoft's version of javascript). Each page will default to using VBScript unless the programmer specifies otherwise by placing the appropriate command within the script itself. Any scripts within an ASP page will be executed on the server so the client browser will only see the HTML code and the output of the scripts. The code itself will not be visible.

To use ASP you just need to name your files with a .asp extension.