All about the site

The HESG Website has been entirely handcoded in PHP. PHP is an open source, server-side, cross-platform scripting language created in 1994 to allow the creation of dynamic web sites. Since inception PHP has seen exponential growth - recently overtaking Microsoft's ASP format as the most popular scripting language usage. Dynamic web sites are more flexible and potent than simple HTML linked pages and allow interaction via user parameters or databases

The informational backend of the site is provided by the worlds most popular open source database. MySQL is a viable competitor to the pricey goliaths such as Oracle and Microsoft's SQL Server. It has been known to handle databases as large as 60,000 tables with more than 5 billion rows, however this deployment is somewhat smaller.

The web pages make extensive use of Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) technology. CSS was designed in 1996 to eliminate the use of convoluted table tags and invisible spacer GIFs to push things around on a page using conventional HTML. HTML was never meant to control the form or appearance of Web pages, being a language that defines the structure and function of elements on a page whilst leaving the Web browser to decide how those elements should actually appear. CSS enable us to get more control the right way: by separating the part that defines structure from the part that defines form. The HTML remains clean and simple, as originally intended, and the CSS code controls appearances from afar. CSS allows less code giving smaller pages and faster download time, phenomenal cross-browser compatiblity, as well as more precise control than ever before.

The site was created in July 2004 and is designed and maintained by Boolean.