Plug-ins
One of the most significant steps forward in client-side programming is the development of the plug-in. This is a way for a programmer to add new functionality to the browser by downloading a piece of code that plugs itself into the appropriate spot in the browser. It tells the browser, “From now on you can perform this new activity.” (You need to download the plug-in only once.) Some fast and powerful behavior is added to browsers via plug-ins, but writing a plug-in is not a trivial task, and isn’t something you’d want to do as part of the process of building a particular site. The value of the plug-in for client-side programming is that it allows an expert programmer to develop extensions and add those extensions to a browser without the permission of the browser manufacturer. Thus, plug-ins provide a “back door” that allows the creation of new client-side programming languages (although not all languages are implemented as plug-ins).
Scripting languages
Plug-ins resulted in the development of browser scripting languages. With a scripting language, you embed the source code for your client-side program directly into the HTML page, and the plug-in that interprets that language is automatically activated while the HTML page is being displayed. Scripting languages tend to be reasonably easy to understand and, because they are simply text that is part of an HTML page, they load very quickly as part of the single server hit required to procure that page. The trade-off is that your code is exposed for everyone to see (and steal). Generally, however, you aren’t doing amazingly sophisticated things with scripting languages, so this is not too much of a hardship.
One scripting language that you can expect a Web browser to support without a plug-in is JavaScript (this has only a passing resemblance to Java and you’ll have to climb an additional learning curve to use it. It was named that way just to grab some of Java’s marketing momentum). Unfortunately, most Web browsers originally implemented JavaScript in a different way from the other Web browsers, and even from other versions of themselves. The standardization of JavaScript in the form of ECMAScript has helped, but it has taken a long time for the various browsers to catch up (and it didn’t help that Microsoft was pushing its own agenda in the form of VBScript, which also had vague similarities to JavaScript). In general, you must
program in a kind of least-common-denominator form of JavaScript in order to be able to run on all browsers. Dealing with errors and debugging JavaScript can only be described as a mess. As proof of its difficulty, only recently has anyone created a truly complex piece of JavaScript (Google, in GMail), and that required excessive dedication and expertise.
This points out that the scripting languages used inside Web browsers are really intended to solve specific types of problems, primarily the creation of richer and more interactive graphical user interfaces (GUIs). However, a scripting language might solve 80 percent of the problems encountered in client-side programming. Your problems might very well fit completely within that 80 percent, and since scripting languages can allow easier and faster development, you should probably consider a scripting language before looking at a more involved solution such as Java programming.
Java
If a scripting language can solve 80 percent of the client-side programming problems, what about the other 20 percent—the “really hard stuff”? Java is a popular solution for this. Not only is it a powerful programming language built to be secure, cross-platform, and international, but Java is being continually extended to provide language features and libraries that elegantly handle problems that are difficult in traditional programming languages, such as concurrency, database access, network programming, and distributed computing. Java allows client-side programming via the applet and with Java Web Start.
An applet is a mini-program that will run only under a Web browser. The applet is downloaded automatically as part of a Web page (just as, for example, a graphic is automatically downloaded). When the applet is activated, it executes a program. This is part of its beauty—it provides you with a way to automatically distribute the client software from the server at the time the user needs the client software, and no sooner. The user gets the latest version of the client software without fail and without difficult reinstallation. Because of the way Java is designed, the programmer needs to create only a single program, and that program automatically works with all computers that have browsers with built-in Java interpreters. (This safely includes the vast majority of machines.) Since Java is a full-fledged programming language, you can do as much
work as possible on the client before and after making requests of the server. For example, you won’t need to send a request form across the Internet to discover that you’ve gotten a date or some other parameter wrong, and your client computer can quickly do the work of plotting data instead of waiting for the server to make a plot and ship a graphic image back to you. Not only do you get the immediate win of speed and responsiveness, but the general network traffic and load on servers can be reduced, preventing the entire Internet from slowing down.