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Web Server Basics

A web server is a combination of computer hardware and software that delivers web pages and applications to clients using HTTP and the client-server model. It interacts with clients through web browsers to deliver requested files, web pages, email, and other services. The primary functions of a web server are to communicate with clients using HTTP, respond to requests by delivering web pages and other resources, and support server-side scripting for dynamic content generation.

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93 views

Web Server Basics

A web server is a combination of computer hardware and software that delivers web pages and applications to clients using HTTP and the client-server model. It interacts with clients through web browsers to deliver requested files, web pages, email, and other services. The primary functions of a web server are to communicate with clients using HTTP, respond to requests by delivering web pages and other resources, and support server-side scripting for dynamic content generation.

Uploaded by

Shadab malik shah
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as TXT, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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A web server is the combination of computer and the program installed on it.

Web server interacts with the client through a web browser. It delivers the web
pages to the client and to an application by using the web browser and the HTTP
protocols respectively.

We can also define the web server as the package of large number of programs
installed on a computer connected to Internet or intranet for downloading the
requested files using File Transfer Protocol, serving e-mail and building and
publishing web pages.

A web server works on a client server model. A computer connected to the Internet
or intranet must have a server program. While talking about Java language then a
web server is a server that is used to support the web component like the Servlet
and JSP. Note that the web server does not support to EJB (business logic
component) component.

A computer connected to the Internet for providing the services to a small company
or a departmental store may contain the HTTP server (to access and store the web
pages and files), SMTP server (to support mail services), FTP server ( for files
downloading) and NNTP server (for newsgroup). The computer containing all the above
servers is called the web server.

Internet service providers and large companies may have all the servers like HTTP
server, SMTP server, FTP server and many more on separate machines. In case of
Java, a web server can be defined as the server that only supports to the web
component like servlet and jsp. Notice that it does not support to the business
component like EJB.

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The term web server can refer to either the hardware (the computer) or the software
(the computer application) that helps to deliver web content that can be accessed
through the Internet.

The most common use of web servers is to host websites, but there are other uses
such as gaming, data storage or running enterprise applications.
The primary function of a web server is to deliver web pages to clients. The
communication between client and server takes place using the Hypertext Transfer
Protocol (HTTP). Pages delivered are most frequently HTML documents, which may
include images, style sheets and scripts in addition to text content.

A user agent, commonly a web browser or web crawler, initiates communication by


making a request for a specific resource using HTTP and the server responds with
the content of that resource or an error message if unable to do so. The resource
is typically a real file on the server's secondary storage, but this is not
necessarily the case and depends on how the web server is implemented.

While the primary function is to serve content, a full implementation of HTTP also
includes ways of receiving content from clients. This feature is used for
submitting web forms, including uploading of files.

Many generic web servers also support server-side scripting using Active Server
Pages (ASP), PHP, or other scripting languages. This means that the behaviour of
the web server can be scripted in separate files, while the actual server software
remains unchanged. Usually, this function is used to create HTML documents
dynamically ("on-the-fly") as opposed to returning static documents. The former is
primarily used for retrieving and/or modifying information from databases. The
latter is typically much faster and more easily cached but cannot deliver dynamic
content.

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