Chapter 24. .NET and Security

In this chapter, we'll take a look at the server-side of things. JavaScript is great in the browser, but it's also used to communicate to the server. For example, we've been using HTML forms to support the HTML controls we use in JavaScript, but those forms were originally intended to send data back to the server. Here, we'll see how to work with data when it is sent back to the server.

There are plenty of ways to install your code on the server. In this chapter, we'll take a look at two of those ways: Microsoft's .NET initiative; and Perl (which stands for Practical Extraction and Reporting Language ), one of the most popular Common Gateway Interface (CGI) programming languages.

Microsoft's .NET initiative is a huge affair, involving many programming packages and a fundamental change to Microsoft Windows. Usually, the code you use in .NET web applications stays on the server, and everything needs a round trip to the server in order to be processed . However, there's a way to add JavaScript to .NET pages that enables you to avoid that round tripa way not many .NET programmers know about. We'll see how to use JavaScript in .NET in this chapter.

Perl is one of the popular programming languages for server-side CGI programming. It's both free and already installed on most UNIX-based web servers, so the chances are good that you already have access to it. We'll get an introduction to Perl in this chapter, sufficient to enable you to write Perl code, to read data from JavaScript-enabled web pages, and to return new web pages based on data the user enters.

Tip

As of this writing, the Tripod network, www.tripod.lycos.com, offers free web sites that include access to Perl.

I'll start by taking a look at using JavaScript with .NET programming.