1.1 The Cows Scripting Language

Cows is a scripting language whose main goal is to make the creation and updating of a web site faster, more flexible and less prone to errors without relying on server-side technologies (scripting languages, web server extensions etc.). The idea behind this is that server-side technology should only be used to add dynamic features. Nowadays, many sites rely on it also to make site administration easier - even when contents are static - losing the many advantages of static pages (see Section 2.3.6 for a detailed analysis).

If all or part of your contents are dynamic, you'll obviously need a a server side scripting language but you can still appreciate Cows for every task not relying on dynamic change of your site's contents. I actually use G-Cows, PHP, custom Apache modules and application server technology. You don't have to choose among static pages and dynamic ones: you can easily get the best of both worlds.

Using Cows, you'll be able to use all your favorite Unix tools while creating a site: you can traverse the whole site with find, extract information with grep, build complex pipelines and so on...

You can also include external scripts and programs written in every language whose interpreter or compiler is installed on your machine. Some tasks can be very easy to accomplish with a small shell script; other may require more complex languages.

A Unix system is made of small programs doing simple jobs, arrangeable in endless combinations: every tool can cooperate with the others, resulting in a great power, whose only limit is user's inventive.

Cows gives the best results when used in conjunction with the Make utility, available on all Unix systems.