84 | DECEMBER 2017 | OPEN SOURCE FOR YOU | http://www.OpenSourceForU.comDevelopers Overview
- Can adapt to increased workloads: If a Web application
requires higher power to perform certain tasks then only
the server hardware needs to be upgraded. The capacity
of a Web application can be increased by ‘clustering’ the
software on different servers simultaneously. - Increased security: Web applications are deployed on
dedicated servers which are maintained and monitored
by experienced server administrators. This leads to
tighter security and any potential breaches are noticed
far more quickly. - Flexible core technologies: We can use any of the available
three core technologies for building Web applications,
based on the requirements of that application. Java-based
solutions (J2EE) involve technologies such as servlets
and JSP. The recent Microsoft .NET platform makes use
of SQL Server, Active Server Pages and .NET scripting
languages. The last option is the open source platforms
(PHP and MySQL), which are best suited for smaller and
low budget websites.
Different open source tools for developing
Web applicationsKompoZer
This is an open source HTML editor, which is based on the
Nvu editor. It’s maintained as a community-driven software
development project, and is a project on Sourceforge.
KompoZer’s WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get)
editing capabilities are among its main attractions. The latest
of its pre-release versions is KompoZer 0.8 beta 3. Its stable
version was KompoZer 0.7.10, released in August 2007. It
complies with the Web standards of W3C. By default, the
Web pages are created in accordance with HTML 4.01 Strict.
It uses Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) for styling purposes, but
the user can even change the settings and choose between the
following styling options:
HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.0
Strict and transitional DTD
CSS styling and the old <font> based styling.
KompoZer can actually call on the W3C HTML validator,
which uploads different Web pages to the W3C Markup
Validation Service and then checks for compliance.Features- Available free of cost.
- Easy to use, hence even non-techies can work with it.
- Combines Web file management and easy-to-use
WYSIWYG Web page editing. - Allows direct code editing.
- Supports Split code graphic view.
phpMyAdmin
phpMyAdmin is an open source software tool written in
PHP. It handles the administration of MySQL over the Web.It supports a wide range of different operations on MariaDB
and MySQL. Some of the frequently used operations (such as
managing databases, relations, tables, indexes, users, etc) can
be performed with the help of the user interface, while we can
still directly execute any of the SQL statements.Features- Has an intuitive Web interface.
- Imports data from SQL and CSV.
- Can administer multiple servers.
- Has the ability to search globally in a database or a
subset of it. - Can create complex queries using QBE (Query-by-
example). - Can create graphics of our database layout in various
formats. - Can export data to various formats like SQL,
CSV, PDF, etc. - Supports most of the MySQL features such as tables,
views, indexes, etc.
XAMPP
In XAMPP, the X denotes ‘cross-platform’, A stands for the
Apache HTTP server, M for MySQL, and the two Ps for
PHP and Perl. This platform is very popular, and is widely
preferred for open source Web application development. The
development of any Web application using XAMPP helps to
easily stack together a different number of programs in order
to constitute an application as desired. The best part of Web
applications developed using XAMPP is that these are open
source with no licensing required, and are free to use. They
can be customised according to one’s requirement. Although
XAMPP can be installed on all the different platforms, its
installation file is specific to a platform.Features- Can be installed on all operating systems.
Figure 3: Login page for phpMyAdmin (Image source: googleimages.com)