Onsharp

At Onsharp, we're committed to remaining at the cutting edge of technology. This is important to our clients because it means they can be sure that the solutions we provide are the best possible, and will last the longest without needing to be replaced. 

But this can mean that some of what we do seems a bit mysterious.  If you hear someone here saying, "Hey, can you build that site in php?" -- well, just what does that mean?

Here's a quick guide to the computer languages we use here at Onsharp:

• HTML: Hypertext Markup Language. This is the language that tells your computer's browser how to show a page to you. The English on this page has been marked up (that's why it's markup language) so the computer knows which parts ought to be in a list and which bits should be emphasized. HTML also directs your computer so that you can see pictures and click on links to go to other places on the web (that's the hypertext part).
• CSS: Cascading Style Sheets. This language works with HTML to make beautiful computer pages. The colors, shapes, and where things are on the page are all up to the CSS in a properly-built web site. That's the "style" part. The "cascading" part refers to the fact that your computer follows special rules to determine which style information to apply in particular cases -- that's rather technical, and doesn't affect your experience of the website. But the style part sure does; if it weren't for CSS, this page would just be plain blue letters on white, straight down the page. This is where the art comes in.
• XML: Extensible Markup Language. XML is similar in some ways to HTML, and there is a fusion of the two called XHTML. XML is more versatile than HTML, but it's still a markup language, so it's still used for making pages of English (or other human languages) do what we want them to in a computer. 
• PHP: PHP Hypertext Preprocessor. PHP doesn't exactly stand for something the way HTML and CSS do; it originally stood for "Personal Home Page," but now it's used for much more than personal home pages. It's a language that lets developers put commands into a web page, making a dynamic web page -- that is, a web page that does something. This allows things like searches and calculations to be done from a web page.
• C# and C++: C# is a programming language -- a language that tells the computer to do things. With C#, a programmer can make a button that does something besides go from one place to another in the internet. C# communicates well with databases, so it's great for applications that need to sort through data and make decisions. C# is especially good for the internet, so we also use C++, a related language that will work well in other contexts, too.
• Javascript: Javascript, and the related Jscript and Jquery, let designers and developers add extra things to HTML. This is how we can put Google Analytics into our websites, for example. There's a script, a set of instructions for the computer, that tells the computer to count the number of visitors coming to your website. Since Javascript lets the browser respond to things that computer users do, we can use it to make a website let people know when they make a mistake filling out a form, or to build a site that automatically updates a calendar.
• SQL: Structured Query Language. SQL is a database language. A database is an organized collection of information. SQL lets your computer go and find information. You can ask for all the carburetors at a particular price point, or all the accounts that are past due, and the computer will track down that information for you. SQL can be used for a lot of different things.

That's a lot to know, isn't it? Fortunately, you don't have to know all of this. Onsharp has a great team of developers, designers, and web professionals who will use these languages (and new ones, when they're developed) to make sure that your web projects, from webpages to Web 2.0 applications, do exactly what you need them to do.