original adress : http://www.macronimous.com/resources/web_servers_demystifyed.asp
- If you call the URL(Uniform Resource Locator) http://www.macronimous.com/default.asp in your browser, the browser will split-up and understand the three parts,
- The http (Hyper Text transfer Protocol),
- The server name where the site is hosted and
- The web page under the site, default.asp.
- The browser will communicate with a name server to translate the server name "www.macronimous.com" into an IP (Internet Protocol) Address, which it uses to connect to the server machine.
- Then the browser will form a connection to the server at that IP address on port 80.
- By following the HTTP protocol, the browser sent a GET request to the server, asking for the file "http://www.macronimous.com/default.asp".
- Since the browser can understand only HTML Tags, the web server will interpret the server-side scripting and will send the files in HTML format to the Browser. For example, An IIS web server can interpret ASP scripting and will send the browser as a HTML file.
- Then the browser will interpret the HTML tags into formatted web pages, as you see in the browser.
Web Server helps people to create both static and dynamic pages. All HTML pages(with or without client-side scripts) are static, means, the html files will be sent to the browser without any intervention of the web server. But when you write some server side script that can make the site dynamic, here the presence of web server helps us to achieve the dynamic page. For example if you write a GuestBook in ASP then a web server, here IIS, is needed to interpret it. The Web server is actually processing information and generating a page based on the specifics of the query.
A web server can provide security to your pages to some level. A web server with SSL (secured Socket Layer) can give you more protected pages, where you can do secured file transaction like credit card processing. As we previously said web servers can run your server side scripting. Here is the list of some web servers and what server side scripts they can run.
Apache - PHP, CGI/Perl, Python
Tomcat - CGI/Perl, JSP,Servlets, JavaBeans
iPlanet - JSP, Servlets, Enterprise JavaBeans
Chilisoft - ASP
Go web server - LotusScript
The following is the complete webcomparison chart, tells about the platforms which they run and their cost.
Web Server Comparison Chart
|
Note: The above table is prepared with the prices, specified inthe corresponding websites on December 2002.