When companies think about developing a website, they consider various aspects of web development, such as design, website programming, hosting, maintenance etc. and look for a value-for-money solution. Deciding the layout design and finding a hosting service provider is not that tough, but what about programming language? Which language is perfect for any small or large web project?

Though there are several popular web programming languages available in the market, PHP is the ideal choice for any web development project. It is flexible, developer- friendly and resourceful. Most importantly, with the help of PHP programming, you can design a user-friendly website or application and serve your customers efficiently.

PHP is an open-source, free, server-side scripting language. The coding pattern is easily understandable and it works on a variety of operating systems such as Windows, Linux and Unix.

PHP has grown exponentially in the past few years and has made a web developer’s job simpler. For instance, you can now develop large and small websites, CRM solutions, e-commerce shopping carts, informative forums, chatting platforms, community websites etc. with the help of PHP. A dynamic website refreshes its web pages automatically and offers updated content. Using this language, you can develop a dynamic business website comfortably.

PHP data management system is also pretty simple. Web programmers can easily store data, create cookies and calculate the number of viewers by cookies and sessions. PHP has its own memory and stores important data in it, reducing pressure on servers and increases processing speed.

PHP can run multimedia files quite easily as well.Code is executed by the server and therefore, it does not require any additional plug-in support for multimedia files. If you want to develop a PHP application, use a popular framework like, CodeIgniter, Zend to reduce work pressure.

Every company has a fixed budget for their corporate web project and if you don’t have thousands of dollars, then PHP is your ‘knight in shining armor’. It has all the features you need, with the none of the cost you’d want to bear. Even associated necessary software like MySQL, Text Editors and Apache Server are completely free. It gives you the same output for any paid web programming language, but saves your web development costs.

Drupal is an open-source CMS (content management system) which has earned quite a significant popularity with its features. By using Drupal, you can create complex websites easily because there is a Drupal community to give you any kind of assistance in the designing and web programming process. It also offers an array of modules.

First, let’s take a look at the advantages of using Drupal -

• It is an open-source platform.
• It is extremely customizable, which gives you the freedom to create a content–centric as well as user-generated website. That means, you can build anything from a forum to an image gallery.
• It has a huge community of learned people – Yes, Drupal’s open-source community is among the biggest and the best in the world. It contains not only developers but supporters and users as well. They help you with a continuous supply of online tutorials, fast fixing of bugs, core updates and excellent support.
• Drupal offers countless modules to expand its capabilities.
• Drupal gives developers endless opportunities. If you are a developer, there is actually no limit to how much you can do with Drupal. It was created for giving designers complete freedom. Many CMSs focus more on the convenience and user-friendliness of the end-user, which makes the actual development and website programming process very cumbersome and challenging for the developers.
• There is a caching system integrated in Drupal. This system speeds up the response time of the pages and lessens the load on web-servers. It also results in a better performance of the web servers.
• Drupal has an integrated search feature which is quite good, though no match for outside search features such as Google or Yahoo! Still, this kind of search feature is not usually found in most other CMSs.

After the advantages, here comes some disadvantages of Drupal:

• If you are new to Drupal and want your website programming to be over in a short time, say, within a week, using Drupal will not be a clever choice. It takes some time to understand Drupal.
• If you are not a developer, Drupal can be challenging for you since it is made for aiding to the needs of developers.
• Drupal has a complicated admin user-interface, though it will change very soon, Drupal’s user-interface is not as easy to use as it is expected to be.

Let’s put Drupal in a competition with WordPress:

Comparisons are bound to occur because WordPress is a leading open-source CMS and so is Drupal. If you are creating a very complex website wherein there will be customized content, user registration, custom permissions etc., it’s better to use Drupal.

If you want just a blog or a portfolio site, it is better to use WordPress.

If you want inspiration and a little motivation for using Drupal, Mozilla and Ubuntu are some of the well-known websites that use it.

For most of us, using Internet Explorer is a forgotten reality. However, some people still prefer to use Internet Explorer even today, ignoring the benefits and interesting features of other browsers, such as Chrome and Firefox.

Recent release of Internet Explorer 9 proved this fact. Since some people associated with website programming and PHP programming were excited about it, we decided to check usability of IE9 by testing ourselves.

Our Experience of Using IE9

Let us start this post by describing our experience of using IE9. The first step was to download and install IE9. It went smoothly. We were almost convinced that our skepticism about IE was wrong, when we were proved wrong.

We were eager to find out appearance of our company website in IE9. The result was shocking.

Our website’s layout was broken (leaving us heart-broken as well). After sulking for several minutes, we decided to be pro-active. Our web programming experts managed to solve the problem by opting for the XUA Meta hack. Things restored to normal (great relief, we muttered amongst ourselves).

Why People are so Frustrated about IE?

While all browsers come with their respective flaws, most people agree that IE managed to frustrate them the most. We think that the problem lies in poor effort that Microsoft invested in improving the browsers.

Most web browsers learned from their mistakes and tried to offer people better user experiences in their subsequent versions. IE developers, of course, did not follow this method. If one version incorporated a unique feature, the subsequent versions messed it up.

Also, many times, new versions of IE failed to address the issues that were present in earlier versions. Problems persisted, making users frustrated with time.

Review of IE9

• IE9 has improved regarding usability and speed of the interface. However, when it comes to the browser speed, it fails. Loading times of tabs and windows are unfavorable. Additionally, as compared to other browsers, the interface is unrefined.

• To understand inconsistencies of the interface of IE9, users can check the settings menu. The Atom feed and RSS notification feature is absent in the address bar. Therefore, users need to opt for the almost hidden default bar.

• Now, most Internet users are not tech-savvy. Therefore, it would be more difficult for them to find out this default bar and use it.

• Another disadvantage of using IE9 is that it is not compatible with Windows XP. Therefore, chances are high that many users will avoid using it.

Can We call IE9 a Modern Browser?

To simplify matters, we will first explain what we mean by ‘modern browsers’. Modern browsers offer predictable patterns that developers can utilize fully. They do not remove specifications suddenly.

Going by this definition, we cannot label IE as a modern browser. Of course, we admit that as compared to earlier versions, IE is better and enhanced. However, we are not exactly hopeful about the future of IE. According to our opinion, web developers should use avoid using IE9 and opt for other browsers.

We think that with competition becoming increasingly tough, chances are high that IE will die a natural death within few years.

There is no denying Mozilla’s contribution behind open source browser and overall web development. Its Firefox was the first major rival of IE that gave Microsoft reasons to upgrade its aging web browser. However, after arrival of Google Chrome, Mozilla has been facing some competition in keeping users hooked to Firefox, its widely popular free browser.

Taking a leaf from Google’s book, Mozilla has resorted to a faster upgrade cycle for Firefox. There has been mixed reactions to its decision to adopt a six-week upgrade cycle in the web development sector. However, latest iterations of Firefox have proved to be faster, feature rich and they have put a smile on faces of web programming veterans. Firefox 7 in particular, has drawn rave reviews for its excellent memory handling features and developer centric tools.

Even before developers and users can fully explore version 7 of Firefox, Mozilla has unleashed a beta of Firefox version 8. It does come with some new features, but they cannot be called ‘remarkable’. For a website development company relying on Firefox for app testing and development, version 8, however, looks promising.

With version 8, Mozilla aims to address an age old grudge of users – users upgrading to new version of Firefox had compatibility problems with add-ons meant for earlier version. To resolve this long standing issue, Firefox 8 notifies users of add-ons that are currently installed on first run and also offers them provisions to disable and remove unwanted ones. They can also re-enable add-ons that were disabled earlier. It can be done through a dialog box that is pretty intuitive.

USP of Firefox 8 is Twitter search integration. This works quite well and brings good results for integrated searches. Of course, users can change default search engine to Bing or Google if they like. This version of Firefox also features an animated visible tab action that occurs when a user reorders tabs. This is something Chrome users are familiar with already and helps those users who work with lots of tabs opened simultaneously.

Firefox 8 beta is available for Mac and Linux OS, along with Windows. This version is equipped with cross-origin resource sharing, which is recommended by W3C. This enables cross-site sharing without compromising user security. Similar to earlier versions of Firefox, version 8 beta also contains some under-the-hood feature upgrades that may remain elusive to casual users. Those developers, who are excited about HTML 5, will be happy to know that Firefox 8 comes with HTML 5 context menu support.

Firefox 8 Beta offers users an option to manage tabs at start-up efficiently. They can choose to resume browsing from where they had left, but Firefox would not load tabs at all if users deselect this option. This feature is ideal for users who are stuck with sluggish internet connections.

It is not known exactly when Mozilla will release stable version of this browser. However, given its speedy upgrade cycle, it can be assumed that Firefox 8 full version will hit the web next month.

Tablet computing received new lease of life with iPad redefining this segment a year back. Since then, every major technology giant, including Lenovo and Dell, has been busy introducing its own versions of tablet touch screen devices.

Amazon, which is mostly known as a major online retailer with an impressive corporate identity, does not want to be left behind in this race to woo gadget users. It has revamped its popular Kindle e-book reader with new features and wants to give serious competition to Apple, which still owns a majority of stake in global tablet market.

Needless to say, increased use of tablets for web browsing has opened new career avenues for web developers who are exploring options to develop tablet based apps. They have several platforms to choose from, including iOS, Android and Blackberry OS. Windows 8 will hit shelves the next year, which is being touted by Microsoft as a tablet centric OS.

So, what does the release of Kindle Fire mean for web programming veterans specializing in tablet app development?

For a website development company focussing on tablet app development, Kindle Fire remains an intriguing device, more so for its unremarkable new hardware. It is true that Amazon has unveiled 4 variants of Kindle but basically, there is only one Color tablet and three Ink-based devices. These three Ink-based tablets offer more feature than earlier versions of Kindle, but they do not have any groundbreaking features as such. Kindle Touch comes with a touch based Infrared Sensor and lacks mechanical buttons. Only Kindle Fire offers a Touch screen with Color Display.

As a matter of fact, ink-based Kindle models cannot be classified as full-fledged tablets and developers do not have many reasons to warm up to them. Kindle Fire does run on Android, though Amazon has not highlighted on that aspect much, yet, in its promotional activities.

As a tablet, it falls far short of competition. For instance, it does not have a camera, GPS navigation and SD card slot, etc. As far as connectivity goes, there is WiFi and USB. This does limit scope for developers willing to make apps for Kindle Fire.
Amazon Kindle Fire is equipped with new Silk browser. This is useful for delivering good results where connectivity is sluggish. Given its feature set and usability, Kindle Fire does not pose much threat to Android tablets. It is more than an e-Book reader for sure, but does not contain any major new feature.

Developers rue the fact that Kindle KDK, unveiled almost a year back, is still in beta version. There are a handful of apps available for Kindle but prospect of final version of KDK is uncertain. Android developers are warming up to release of Android OS4, which is just a few days away. However, there is no likelihood of Amazon switching to this much talked about update for its flagship e-book tablet.

Kindle Fire is based on a modified version of Android Froyo, which can make developing apps for it rather cumbersome. Google is trying to do away with Android segment fragmentation and this may make things difficult for Kindle app development.

From initial developments, it seems that Amazon is not going all the way out to woo developers to make apps for its tablet, in contrast to Microsoft. Amazon did not talk much about developers at launch of new Kindle.