Building an Internet World Wide Web Server
Ashley A. Barnett, F. G. Bates, James Earl Russell · SPE Computer Applications · 1996
Summary The World Wide Web (WWW) is the fastest growing client/server environment on the Internet. This environment consists of a group of software products and a set of protocols and conventions. The WWW environment, based on hypertext and hypermedia technology, allows intuitive, seamless, "point and click" access to and interaction with information distributed across the Internet. Many think of the WWW as solely responsible for transforming the way the Internet is accessed and used by millions of users worldwide. Although the use of WWW "clients" is intuitive and seamless, the building and deploying of WWW "servers" is more complex and time-consuming. Both commercial and shareware/freeware WWW server software is available for most hardware and operating system configurations. Choosing the right server depends on your objectives. A Windows/DOS server is sufficient for providing access to small amounts of information to a small number of users. A commercial server with user authentication and encryption capability is required to provide wide area access to mission critical information residing in distributed databases. This paper discusses WWW technology and describes how to choose and obtain a WWW server. We include many references to online resources and documentation, and we also discuss authoring tools.