Stand back, I'm going to try prognostication...

[blufive]

If you work in the business of generating web pages to display to users, you need to know: there's going to be some major changes in the browser landscape over the next year or three

Comments

[stsquad]

There are essentially two sides to web-programming these days. All the fancy form-filling and whizzy effects are done by JavaScript (and numerous JavasScript libraries such as jQuery). For that all you need is a developer friendly browser. I'd suggest one of:

* Firefox - with the FireBug extension
* Google Chrome/Chromium - with there developer tools

On the server side if your doing anything with the data you'll need something more than static HTML files. Pretty much anything can create web-pages on the fly using CGI. The web server passes the request to program and the program spits out some HTML to stdout which the web-server dutifully sends back.

I don't know but I wouldn't be surprised if Lazurus has some support for CGI programs. However the biggies are probably:

* Perl - traditional hacker tool and responsible for most of the early CGI scripts. Still in heavy use and has a massive archive of modules (called CPAN) that make lots of stuff easy. However the language is a unholy mixture of paradigms and punctuation soup which may offend your eyeballs. Often referred to as a write once language.

* PHP - very popular due to it's ease of use. You write web-pages as normal and use tags to escape into bit of code. It has a fairly comprehensive standard library. It's fairly easy to pick up but does have a reputation for being hard to write secure code.

However most heavy systems use web frameworks which are more tuned to developing web-apps. There are lots out there of which the Ruby on Rails possibly gets the most press. Based on Ruby it's very popular with certain sections of the web programming community. However I've never used it but friends of mine really like the language.

I'd be tempted to suggest Python as I'm a growing fan of it for all sorts of rapid prototyping. It's a nice sensible language which after my experience with Perl comes as a relief. The base language has a simple CGI module for simple scripts and a wealth of frameworks of which Django probably has the greatest mindshare amongst Python folks.

Given I don't think I've met you and all I know is you like Pascal I'd suggest Python, YMMV ;-)

[davidwake]

Lazarus seems to do the trick, even installing here on the work computer. It's a bit buggy in the debugging, but I suspect that's because work computer security said "Noooo!" to a .dll. I've manage to write the "Do not press this button again" program.

As for web programming, thanks for the advice. I have a gander at the links. I really need some hand-holding (I loathe the lower slopes of the learning curve) and I need to decide what I want to program on the web. And, more importantly, why.

[stsquad]

Oh, twiddle! It doesn't work on my home computer. I get a "External: SIGSEBV" debugging error. The Lazarus website, well complicated in its forum comments, suggest this might be Bit Defender objecting. It's [rude word] Vista, probably, but I've no idea how to solve it.

Ho hum.

[davidwake]

Spoke too soon.

It doesn't work on my home computer. I get a "External: SIGSEBV" debugging error. The Lazarus website, well complicated in its forum comments, suggest this might be Bit Defender objecting. It's [rude word] Vista, probably, but I've no idea how to solve it.

Ho hum.

[davidwake]

Woo who!!!

It was Bit Defender messing up Lazarus, which I can't seem to switch off, but it has a game mode. Clearly computing has now detected that I don't do any serious programming anymore, but instead I'm only playing.