Content area
Full text
My colleague has a placard over her desk that reads, "Oh no, not another learning experience." It's a great sign because it really captures the frustration of having to keep up with the incessant pace of library technology. Even the most ambitious Iibrarian can grow dizzy from the centrifugal force of the library technology learning curve. It is impossible to learn every new technology. I have recently come to the conclusion that, as a worker at a small library, I must be strategic and learn only those technologies that will yield the greatest benefit to my facility and patrons.
Of all the technologies that I have learned during the last 10 years, the one that has been the most beneficial to my patrons and the most empowering for me has been serverside Web scripting. If you are a regular reader of CIL, you know what I'm talking about. Look at past CIL tables of contents: It is clear that librarians are implementing and writing about online knowledgebases, intranet/content management systems, and customizable library portals. And at the core of every one of these systems is some type of serverside scripting technology.
And yet, not every library has been able to utilize server-side scripting. Small libraries, in particular, have been hard-pressed to implement this useful (dare I say "essential") technology. What is it about server-side scripting that makes it so difficult to implement? It isn't the hardware or software that makes it so inaccessible-after all, you probably already have a Web server that could be configured to run server-side scripts with a click or two on a mouse. Yet once that server is enabled, a language barrier remains. (Great-an opportunity for yet another learning experience!) In this column, I'll compare and contrast the most popular scripting languages that are used to create truly dynamic serviceoriented Web sites, building a conceptual framework that you can use as a starting point for your specific server-side library project.
To fully utilize server-side scripting, you must have two components: a script-enabled server and virtual or physical access to it. Nearly all Web servers, including Apache and Microsoft's US (Internet Information Server), come with a pre-installed server-side scripting engine. Enabling these services is usually a trivial task that requires just a...