Programming Terminology

Dynamic Site

Programming languages can run on the server to execute server-side languages to create dynamic sites. By doing so, they can connect to databases or other data sources to programmatically create HTML responses (dynamically). Dynamic sites can also be created in the browser with JavaScript but usually when we say "dynamic website" we're talking about server-side dynamic sites. Here are some popular programming languages for making dynamic sites:

  • PHP
  • Python
  • JavaScript (Node)
  • Java
  • C#
  • Ruby

There are a few tradeoffs to making a dynamic website compared to a static one:

Dynamic Sites:

  • Are generally more expensive to make and host than static sites.
  • Require a programming language on the server to execute to generate the dynamic response.
  • Can have dynamic content rendered from the server.
  • Can make much more complex projects compared to static sites.