Ever wondered how a website is able to remember your preferences, let you search the site without hassle or display amazing rollover effects to aid learning? In a plain website with no scripting, users can only enjoy textual content from the site. They can only treat the website as a book; The website might become dull, boring and visitors will not hesitate to exit your site in minutes.
An effective website should engage the users and promote an Internet style of learning. This is typically achieved through the use of scripting.
Scripting is very much the same as programming. Just like how a computing task needs a good program, a website needs a good script. There are two types of scripting - The client-side scripting and server-side scripting.
"Client-side scripting generally refers to the class of computer programs on the web that are executed client-side, by the user's web browser".
Processing is done on the browser itself. This is particularly important in the development of DHTML.
A good example of client-side scripting would be form verification.
Click on the button above. If there is no text in the textbox, you should get an error alert. Otherwise, a "success" message is alerted. This is often used during online registration processes.
On the other hand, server-side scripting involves processing done on the web server. This is usually used when databases are involved.
A good example would be search engines like Google. When keywords are being searched, a server-side script is being run on the server, producing the results on the results page.
Server-side scripting, though able to produce amazing things for your website, is not supported in ThinkQuest:
"Server-based technologies such as PHP, Perl, SSI, Java, CGI, and FrontPage extensions are NOT supported."
This is due to security reasons and thus, for ThinkQuest, we would stick mostly to the JavaScript and ActionScript.
