What is Server Technology?
The World Wide Web servers are HTTP
or Hyper Text Transfer Protocol servers. In the beginning of the World Wide Web on
the Unix operating system Apache servers provided this service all over the Internet. HTTP
server provides many services such as delivery of web pages (HTML files), email services
such as SMTP(simple mail transfer protocol), POP(post office portocol), file
transfer service as FTP(file transfer protocol) and application sevices such as CGI form
feed, etc. Different services depends on how server has been developed. HTTP server
side programming depends on its operating system environment. For example, Apache server
is developed for the Unix environment and it needs applications that are developed
on Unix system. The Internet has now two main system environments for HTTP servers: Unix
and Windows NT which have taken the most of the Internet server market. Unix has now two HTTP servers: one good old Apache server and
another Netscape Enterprise server. For more information visit Netscape.
Windows NT also has two servers: One Internet Information Server
and anthor Netscape Enterprise server. However, NT is not that friendly with
Netscape Enterprise server. It prefers its own server IIS. As mentioned above
that each server side programming depends on its operating system. For example, IIS is the
windows server and need windows programming paradigm.
For the Internet services all clients are networked with HTTP
servers. They all receive services from one of the HTTP servers at a particular session
from a particular site of that server. A server can contain one or more domain.
A domain can have hundred of sites published. Sites provide services to thier
clients. This sort of internal distributions of a server where sites are published
is a particular server's networking. This networking is maintained and administered by
particular server owner. For example, www.microsoft.com's
maintained and administered by Mircrosoft.
For example, if you wish to have
your HTTP server on a Windows NT operating system server, you must have knowledge and
experiece of NT operating system and its network administration and programming. In
addition, Windows NT server's Internet Information Server and its co-servers such as
Transact Server, Index Server, Certificate Server, Exchange Server and other services need
background of Visual Basic programming skill. To build a site for this environment
you must have programming experience of Active Server Page (ASP), VBScript, and
JavaScript. Similarly, if you chose Netscape Enterprise Server on Unix system,
you must know Unix programming, JavaScript, CGI Script, Perl, etc.
