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PHP is more popular
PHP
In the early days, the corporations such as Microsoft and Macromedia made their money by not unreasonably charging a lot of money for their products. More independently minded web developers would usually choose the more budget-friendly (i.e. free) route of PHP – I’ve used PHP for years and for many projects. 🙂
It is an excellent product. Something like 75% of the world’s websites where a server-side language is detected, use PHP. That in comparison to ASP.NET’s 5%. So PHP is worth mentioning.
PHP was originally written as a set of tools for the tool’s author – Rasmus Lerdorf – to track visits to his home page. He called his creation Personal Home Page Tools – PHP.
PHP evolved rapidly and was taken over by two developers, Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans. They rewrote PHP and introduced a modular architecture supporting extensions like image processing and XML parsing. They released PHP 3.0 in 1998 and it was a big success.
Like ASP.NET, PHP runs on the server side, usually alongside Apache web server. A .php page request is handled by PHP which acts as a hypertext processor, replacing variable text and returning custom HTML to the user.
PHP continues to be popular. It is the core technology behind WordPress which powers an estimated 500 million websites – more than 40% of the world’s total.
Cookies are actually a lifesaver
The Humble Cookie
A big issue for a web developer was the problem of state. Let me explain.
In the old days, users would login to a computer system and maintain a session the server always knew who you were. However, with the introduction of HTTP, interaction with a server became state-less.
Stateless means that each request from a browser to a web server contains all necessary information for a server to fulfill that request. So each request is entirely independent of any other request and that means a server doesn’t retain session data between requests.
So how, as a programmer, do you log a user in and authenticate subsequent html page requests without the user constantly having to login?
At that time, there were two methods. Method 1 would involve adding on a token like an auth_key to the URL like https://xyz.com/bet?auth_key=12345 . This meant searching though HTML and updating URLs so they pass the token back to the server. Messy and troublesome.
A second and better method was to work with cookies. A cookie is a small text file stored on a user’s device by a web browser. To issue a cookie, all the server has to do is to tell the browser to create a cookie, called “something”, with a value of “something else” – usually a token (a unique key to identify the owner).
Once it is stored, the cookie and its value is always sent along with any subsequent request to the same website that issued it. In this ways, the server can identify new requests by reading the cookie and authenticating the token.
For authentication, cookies play a crucial role in maintaining user sessions. Without cookies, users would need to authenticate on every page load, making seamless navigation and personalized experiences difficult. Early e-commerce and online banking platforms heavily relied on cookies to enable secure and persistent user sessions, shaping modern web authentication as we know it today.
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Conclusion
Online gambling benefited enormously from the introduction of the new web technologies.
In the really early days of game development, coalface guys like Henrik Sandin worked out how to do clever stuff like display graphics, pixel by pixel, and present them at the same speed on any PC.
Luckily for us mortals, the availability of new platforms such as RealPlayer, Java applets and Flash enabled us to present casino games without getting our hands too dirty.
Nevertheless. picking the right technical horse was, and still is, a huge gamble in itself. Choosing Java applets turned out the be not so good whereas Shockwave, later Flash, was surely a better choice.
Success bred success and those that successfully mastered the new technologies went on to fame and fortune.
Nowadays everything is HTML5 – which is all free and anyone can program it using a simple editor.
Power to the people!
