scripting

Ajax, shorthand for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, is a web development technique for creating interactive web applications. The intent is to make web pages feel more responsive by exchanging small amounts of data with the server behind the scenes, so that the entire web page does not have to be reloaded each time the user makes a change. This is meant to increase the web page's interactivity, speed, and usability.

The Ajax technique uses a combination of:

• XHTML (or HTML) and CSS, for marking up and styling information.
• The DOM accessed with a client-side scripting language, especially ECMAScript implementations such as JavaScript and JScript, to dynamically display and interact with the information presented.
• The XMLHttpRequest object to exchange data asynchronously with the web server. In some Ajax frameworks and in certain situations, an IFrame object is used instead of the XMLHttpRequest object to exchange data with the web server.

Bash is a Unix shell written for the GNU Project. Its name is an acronym for Bourne-Again SHell — a pun (Bourne again / born again) on the Bourne shell (sh), which was an early, important Unix shell. The Bourne shell was the shell distributed with Version 7 Unix, circa 1978. The original Bourne shell was written by Stephen Bourne, then a researcher at Bell Labs. The Bash shell was written in 1987 by Brian Fox. In 1990, Chet Ramey became the primary maintainer. Bash is the default shell on most Linux systems as well as on Mac OS X Tiger, and it can be run on most Unix-like operating systems. It has also been ported to Microsoft Windows by the Cygwin project and to MS-DOS by the DJGPP project.

PHP is a scripted programming language that can be used to create websites. Short for "PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor" (the initials actually come from the earliest version of the program, which was called "Personal Home Page Tools," but in their current form, constitute a recursive acronym), it is an open-source, reflective programming language used mainly for developing server-side applications and dynamic web content, and more recently, a broader range of software applications. For example, MediaWiki, the software behind Wikipedia, is written in PHP.

PHP allows interaction with a large number of relational database management systems, such as MySQL, Oracle, IBM DB2, Microsoft SQL Server, PostgreSQL, Firebird and SQLite. PHP runs on most major operating systems, including Unix, Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X, and can interact with many major web servers.