When the World Wide Web first opened its doors to the public in 1994, most web pages were static text files. A new breed of programmers, called web masters, toiled away at their text editors, hour after hour, churning out HTML documents one at a time. Since then, a lot has changed. The vast majority of websites utilize server-side scripting languages to dynamically generate pages on the fly.
Lasso is a server-side scripting language that was originally developed in 1995 as a means to connect Filemaker databases to web servers. While its roots began in the Mac and Filemaker, Lasso has evolved into a multi-platform object-oriented scripting language that fully supports inheritance, sub-classing, and tag-overloading. Lasso has been object-oriented since version 5.0, and thus has had several revisions to refine its OOP model, allowing coders to painlessly write custom types, tags and data sources in plain old Lassoscript. While Lasso has been around for nearly the same amount of time as PHP, it is a lesser known technology; however, it does have a very strong and active community of developers that continues to grow. Lasso is used in nearly every sector of the Internet from e-commerce to banking applications to blogs, education and corporate sites.
Lasso's language, Lasso Dynamic Markup Language (LDML), can be written in a square bracket tag format which resembles HTML, or in a LassoScript format similar to many other scripting languages such as PHP, Perl, and Python.
The Lasso programming language provides developers the ability to create dynamic web sites or applications with data source abstraction. The Lasso language allows the developer to program in such a manner as to be independent of coding for a specific data source. This allows files, sites and applications created with the Lasso language to be ported from data source to data source with minimal or no changes. This level of abstraction is achieved by the interpretive nature of the language.
