Web Servers

Web Servers communicate with client browsers on one side - and with server-side programs and databases on the other.
There are many web servers out there.  Some are written in 300 lines of Perl code.
 

• www.earth.com/server/doc/plexus.html - Plexus web server (httpd) written in perl (~1996) • www.cs.indiana.edu/perl-server/intro.html - perl server (Marc VanHeyningen) • www.cs.indiana.edu/perl-server/code.html - • sourceforge.net/projects/perlwebserver - web server in perl (~2000) • perlwebserver.sourceforge.net/ - • xmlrpc-c.sourceforge.net/xmlrpc-howto/xmlrpc-howto-perl.html - Frontier::RPC allows you to make servers • www.roaccess.com/rochade_products/docs/RoBridge.html - RoBridge Perl Server • www.bgw.org/projects/pas2/ - perl application server • www.webreference.com/perl/cdc/results.html - contest of servers (in Perl)

Others are big 40 MB multi-threaded monsters.
There are even web servers written completely in Java (they are usually slow).
There is evidence that web servers can handle 10,000 simultaneous clients: www.kegel.com/c10k.html

There are many reviews comparing the web servers - for example read here:
• http://serverwatch.internet.com/webservers.html
Look at the latest survey of the web-servers used on the internet today here: www.netcraft.co.uk/survey/ .
You can usually easily find what server is running behind a particular web site by using netcraft .

Most commonly used web servers are:
• Apache (~60% of the Internet) - www.apache.org - the best, has modules to work with Java, Perl, PHP, etc.
• IIS (Microsoft Internet Information Server) - www.microsoft.com
• iPlanet-WebServer-Enterprise (former Netscape Enterprise)  - www.iplanet.com
• AOL Server - www.aolserver.com - read also on  www.arsdigita.com/asj/

Talking about reliability and large enterprise systems, you may read this:
• www.unix-vs-nt.org/kirch/
• www.hot100.com
• www.keynote.com/measures/business/business40.html
• home.netscape.com/enterprise/v3.6/index.html
     ( http://docs.iplanet.com/docs/manuals/enterprise.html - Netscape enterprise docs )
• serverwatch.internet.com/

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