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Open source CGI scripting programming language. Written in 1987. Still one of the most popular web programming languages mostly due to its powerful text-manipulation facilities. A huge number of Perl scripts are available for download.

Perl is a multi purpose programming language that has been adapted for the creation of dynamically generated web pages, which can interface with a database.

Perl is free to use, and most popular on Unix and Linux web hosts. There are however versions available for Windows.

Perl is one of the oldest and most popular languages used for the web, as such there is a huge code base developers can draw upon. Most of the newer languages are easier to learn, however not as versatile.

ASP is Microsoft’s server-side scripting technology. An Active Server Page has an .asp extension and it mixes HTML and scripting code that can be written in VBScript or JScript.

ASP is distributed with Microsoft’s IIS web server, so most host using IIS will also offer ASP for dynamic web programming. ASP.NET is the next version of ASP.

Microsoft developed ASP for use on its NT servers.

ASP can be created using any programming language supported by the ActiveX interface including Visual Basic Script, Java Script, and now even Perl Script.

Web pages using ASP typically have a .asp file extension. The newest version of ASP called ASP.NET also uses the .aspx file extension.

PHP  is a server side scripting language useful for creating dynamically generated web pages, which can interface with a database. PHP is free to use, and is most popular on Unix and Linux web hosts although there are versions available for Windows.

PHP was developed from the ground up to be used as a flexible web based programming language. Because of this, PHP has quickly become one of the most popular languages to write code with.

Web pages using PHP typically have a .php, .php, or .phtml file extension.

PHP is one of the most widely-supported scripting languages on the Web. The area where hosts may differ is on which version(s) of PHP they support.

Instructs the server to include some dynamic information in a Web page before it is sent to a client.

This dynamic information could be current date, an opinion poll, etc. Many hosts require that SSI pages have .shtml extension to reduce the load on servers by not having to parse non-SSI pages