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Web Servers

The term web server can mean one of two things,

A computer responsible for serving web pages, mostly HTML documents, via the HTTP protocol to clients, mostly web browsers or

A software program that is working as a daemon serving web documents.

The most common web or HTTP server programs are:

• Apache HTTP Server
• Internet Information Server (IIS)
• Sun ONE
• iPlanet
• Microsoft Windows PWS
• BEA Weblogic

Apache HTTP Server from the Apache Software Foundation

Apache HTTP Server is an open source HTTP web server for Unix based (BSD, Linux, and UNIX systems), Microsoft Windows, and other platforms. Apache features highly configurable error messages, DBMS-based authentication databases, and content negotiation but has been criticized for its lack of GUI tools to aid in its configuration. Initially, Apache was the only viable open source alternative to the Netscape web server (currently known as iPlanet). It has since evolved to rival (and probably surpass) any other Unix based HTTP server in terms of functionality and speed. Since April 1996 Apache has been the most popular HTTP server on the Internet and in May 1999 it was running on 57% of all web servers and by August 2004 this percentage had increased to 67%.

Apache is redistributed as part of various proprietary packages, e.g., the Oracle database or the IBM WebSphere application server. It is also supported in some way by Borland in the Kylix and Delphi development tools.

The Apache HTTP Server is developed and maintained by an open community of developers under the auspices of the Apache Software Foundation.

Apache has other powerful features included in a large set of modules, including mod_perl, many authentication modules as well as a web proxy module and an extremely useful URL rewriter (also known as a rewrite engine) called mod_rewrite.

Apache logs can be analysed through a web browser using free scripts such as awstats.

Apache is the web server component of the development methodology called LAMP.

There are two different "generations" of Apache, the more common 1.x series ("apache") and the 2.x series ("httpd").

Internet Information Server (IIS) from Microsoft

IIS (Microsoft Internet Information Services or Server) is a set of Internet based services for Windows machines. Originally supplied as part of the Option Pack for Windows NT, they were subsequently integrated with Windows 2000 and Windows Server 2003). The current (Windows 2003) version is IIS 6 and includes servers for FTP, SMTP, NNTP and HTTP/HTTPS servers are packaged in the bundle. Earlier versions also included a Gopher server.

Features

The web server itself can not directly perform server side processing but can delegate the task to ISAPI applicationson the server. Microsoft provide a number of these including ones for Active Server Pages and ASP.NET. Third parties have provided support for PHP and Perl languages in the same way.

Compatibility

Internet Information Services is designed to run on Windows server operating systems. A restricted version that supports one web site and a limited number of connections is also supplied with Windows XP Professional.

Caudium (formerly Roxen)

Caudium is an open source web server. It was originally written as a fork of the Roxen Challenger server. The server is written in C and the Pike programming language, and Pike is also used to create extensions to the server, although Caudium also supports PHP. Caudium is in many ways similar to Apache, and one of its selling points is that it is considered very easy to migrate back and forth between the two servers. This said, the configuration process is different, the directory structure is different, and generally the languages used to program server extensions or dynamic pages are different, although both support PHP. Caudium offers a different performance profile than Apache, because it doesn't fork external processes, making it better suited to cope with sudden spikes of traffic.

AOLserver from America Online

AOLserver is America Online's open source web server. AOLserver is the backbone of the largest and busiest production environments in the world. AOLserver is multithreaded, Tcl-enabled, and used for large scale, dynamic web sites.

AOLserver is distributed under the AOLserver Public License, which is similar to the Mozilla license. AOLserver was originally developed by NaviSoft under the name NaviServer, but changed names when AOL bought the company back in 1995.

thttpd

thttpd is a tiny/turbo/throttling open source web server from ACME Laboratories.

Zeus Web Server

Zeus Web Server is a web server for UNIX platforms (including Linux) that has dominated over the last 10 years. It was developed by a software company in Cambridge, England.

Sun ONE from Sun Microsystems (formerly Netscape's iPlanet nee Enterprise)

Sun ONE Web Server is a competent, secure, scalable, multi-platform web server. It's relatively easy to set up and administer. It was originally developed by Netscape and was first known as Netscape Enterprise Web Server, later renamed to

Netscape iPlanet Web Server. Sun does not seem to be adding features since they bought it from Netscape. As a result its popularity has dropped.

iPlanet from Netscape Communications Corporation

iPlanet is the name of a computer software company. iPlanet was formed when AOL acquired Netscape Communications Corporation, makers both of the Netscape browser and of a variety of computer server software products. Technology analysts believed that AOL's major interest in the Netscape properties was the netscape.com portal website, and toa lesser extent the Netscape Communicator suite. AOL entered into an agreement with server maker Sun Microsystems, under which the server-side software formerly made by Netscape would be sold by iPlanet inc., a corporation jointly owned by Sun and AOL. The name is likely derived from an earlier web portal remote access technology, i-Planet.

The suite of iPlanet offerings included

1. iPlanet Directory Server (an LDAP server)

2. iPlanet Web Server (an HTTP and HTTPS web server)

3. iPlanet Portal Server

4. iPlanet Portal Search (formerly Netscape Compass)

5. iPlanet Application Server (a J2EE application server system)

6. iPlanet Calendar Server

7. iPlanet Meta Directory

8. iPlanet Instant Messaging Server

Stronghold from Red Hat

Stronghold is a commercial version of Apache Web Server, distributed by RedHat Inc..

Microsoft Windows PWS

Microsoft Windows is a range of commercial operating environments for personal computers. The range was first introduced by Microsoft in 1985 and eventually came to dominate the world personal computer market. All recent versions of Windows are fully-fledged operating systems.

Versions

The term Windows is used as a collective term for several generations of products, which can be classified into the following categories:

1. 16-bit Operating environments

2. Hybrid 16/32-bit operating environments

3. Hybrid 16/32-bit operating system

4. 32-bit operating systems

5. 64-bit operating systems

BEA Weblogic

BEA WebLogic is a J2EE application server and also an HTTP web server by BEA Systems of San Jose, California, for Unix,Linux, Solaris, Microsoft Windows, and other platforms. Weblogic supports Oracle, DB2, SQL Server, and other JDBC compliant databases. Weblogic Server supports WS-Security and is J2EE 1.3 compliant.

BEA Weblogic Server is part of the BEA Weblogic Platform™. The other parts of WebLogic Platform are a)Portal which includes Commerce Server and Personalization Server (which is built on JRules by Ilog), b) WebLogic Integration, c)

WebLogic Workstation - an IDE for Java and d) JRockit a JVM for Intel CPUs.

WebLogic Server includes .NET interoperability and supports the following native integration capabilities:

1. Native enterprise-grade JMS messaging

2. Java Connector Architecture

3. WebLogic/Tuxedo Connector

4. COM+ Connectivity

5. CORBA connectivity

6. IBM WebSphere MQ connectivity

BEA WebLogic Server Process Edition also includes Business Process Management and Data Mapping functionality. Weblogic supports security policies managed by Security Administrators. The BEA Weblogic Server Security Model includes:

1. Separate application business logic from security code

2. Complete scope of security coverage for all J2EE and non-J2EE components

Other HTTP servers

NCSA HTTPd

The NCSA HTTPd was a Web server originally developed at the NCSA by Marc Andreessen and others. It was the second web server developed, following Tim Berners-Lee's first web server developed at CERN. It was for some time the natural counterpart to the Mosaic web browser in the client-server World Wide Web.It also introduced the Common Gateway Interface, allowing for the creation of dynamic websites. Development of NCSA HTTPd was suspended in 1998, but the code lives on the Apache project, which now runs approximately two-thirds of Internet web servers.

Xitami

Xitami is a free, open-source web server. It is designed to be small in size but supports many WWW technologies. It was designed as a set of components for ease of reuse. The Xitami server incorporates multithreading technology for high performance. A commercial version of the Xitami server with SSL support is also available.

Website links

http://www.bambooweb.com

http://computer.howstuffworks.com

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