Introduction

Internet sites may be roughly divided into two categories: static and dynamic. When a web server hosts a static site, its role is very limited. The server waits for incoming requests, maps every request to a file on its disk, and sends contents of the file as its response. All pages of such a site have to be prepared ahead of time, and they don't change automatically between visits. The functionality of such sites may seem limited, but they do have a number of advantages. Since the server doesn't do any computational work, static sites can be very fast and can serve large numbers of requests. Such sites are also easy to index by search engines. The fact that a site is static does not mean that it can't be interactive. JavaScript components allow the browser to provide the user with a graphical interface, through which he or she may interact with our website. In the end though, if the user provides us with information we would like to store, we will need a dynamic component to...