What's the most useful web language these days?

[Scuttle]

Last time i really dipped my head into this pool it was all about css with a splash of php if it was needed (i made a point of avoiding it ). These days i'm looking at all the options (xml, php, jscript, newer css) and wondering which would be the best place to start again. I'm familiar with the w3 sites, are there any other places that are really useful for learning/teaching how to work with the web?

[rock]

It all still depends on what you're doing. A lot of the flashy stuff is done in AJAX now, but LAMP is still the backbone (with the P either PHP or Python). On the horizon is Microsoft's Silverlight stuff that is .NET based and Sun's JavaFXscript stuff (like JavaScript, but actually Java).

As for learning, anymore the first place to hit is Wikipedia. Get immersed in all the names and looking at what people are doing with this stuff.

[ImaNihilist]

Still PHP. People have really just discovered what they can do with PHP. As rock said, a lot of the flashy front-end stuff is done with a combination of AJAX/XHTML/CSS. The only "real" alternative to the LAMP stack that's actually used is RoR, which is gaining some momentum.

There's at least a half-dozen new things coming out (ie. Silverlight, Apollo, etc.) but I don't see any of them picking up speed. LAMP is amazingly fleixble, and free, and it's taken 7 years really (since PHP4) for PHP to develop into what it is today, which is the main so-called "Web 2.0" backbone. There's too much to code and stuff out there to make a transition to something like Silverlight really worth it, and their isn't that much to gain. I suspect PHP will be the de-facto standard until at least CSS3 and XML, and a push for some kind of unified web standard.

PHP + AJAX is the way to go.

[Scuttle]

I had no idea what LAMP was until i had a look, it's pretty cool that it's all sort of converging into a 'standard'. I've been having a peek at some simple Ajax stuff (just being able to load multiple bits of content without a refresh) and it's pretty swish, certainly puts up some questions to my old design methods.. i'm intrigued! To give a lame example it reminds me of flash, in that i suppose on a small website, everything could be built around the one page.

Thanks to the both of you! I think i've found me another summer project.

[proxops-pete]

I picked up ColdFusion and loved it!

[ImaNihilist]

I had no idea what LAMP was until i had a look, it's pretty cool that it's all sort of converging into a 'standard'. I've been having a peek at some simple Ajax stuff (just being able to load multiple bits of content without a refresh) and it's pretty swish, certainly puts up some questions to my old design methods.. i'm intrigued! To give a lame example it reminds me of flash, in that i suppose on a small website, everything could be built around the one page.

Thanks to the both of you! I think i've found me another summer project.

xmlhttprequest really *is* AJAX. There's some other stuff in there too, but that's what makes AJAX so appealing. It gives you the same ability to interact with a website like you could with Flash, only it's faster (if done properly), and it's not proprietary.

If you want to see some great examples of what you can do with AJAX, check out miniajax.com. There's a buttload of stuff there, some which require PHP and MySQL and some which don't. Something that used to be there, which isn't anymore, is a neat little script called Y!Shout. I think you have to pay the dev for it now though, which is why it was removed from the page above.

[monroeski]

I had never heard of LAMP before either (though I don't really run in programming circles much anymore). Sounds pretty cool from what little I've read.

Glad PHP is still going strong, though, as that's really the only web language I have experience past a couple of hours in.

[Candyman]

Things are moving in the direction of Ruby on Rails. It's a very productive framework (i.e. extremely quick to put something fairly advanced together), but there are some questions about its scalability which are still being addressed. I'd definitely look into it. This book will tell you everything you need to know and is pretty well-written, to boot.