If you are reading this, probably you are aware of what a website is. Am not going to explain you the bit by bit definitions of website (will do that in another post ). Let’s talk about some technical aspects behind the development part of a website.

… have you ever wondered where your profile pictures are stored? Where all your comments, likes / dislikes are stored? How perfectly they are retrieved from among millions of people’s data?

When you see a website, considering you are a normal internet user, you may never notice the working structure of a website. For instance take Facebook as example; have you ever wondered where your profile pictures are stored? Where all your comments, likes / dislikes are stored? How perfectly they are retrieved from among millions of people’s data? How Facebook knows about your online friends and makes it possible for you to chat with him/her? And when you choose a privacy setting that hide your information to a particular group, how Facebook’s so called “website” manages it?

Yeah, now it seems a bit tough err? The Facebook website must be capable of handling all these functions.

Every single element of information in Facebook is organized in a database with unique identity key that keeps it separate from other information. Facebook then collect all the data required with the help of this unique identity key. So every user is allocated with a unique identity key which then will be used to retrieve data of him/her from the database. So this is what Facebook does (in the simplest form).

Now think about the process involved in an e-commerce website, a user visits the website (eBay for example) – add some stuff to his cart, checks-out with Credit / Debit card or even uses a PayPal account, and he gets his stuff in home, simple, everyone is happy. But wait a minute! How this website knows about the stock availability of the stuff users order? How it maintain the address of this visitor who orders it? What if his Credit or Debit card is invalid? Or does his PayPal account have sufficient balance to check-out? Who is going to check these? Yes of course, our website will do that!

So now you know creating a website with intelligence involves much more intellectual work. A perfect web application must be simple, user friendly, error free and intelligent. The application must be capable of handling all possible common mistakes or errors that is likely to happen. It should be hard coded and sealed off from hijacking. Coming back to our Facebook example a small mistake in the function of handling user’s identity key will lead to false information and misleading facts. So this should be “perfect” in all means.

So how websites are made? Why you need it? Stay tuned coming up…