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Perl CGl Programming: No experience required.
(Publisher: Sybex, Inc.)
Author(s): Erik Strom
ISBN: 0782121578
Publication Date: 11/01/97

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Making Choices about Servers and Browsers

When visitors come to your Web site, all they see is what you’ve decided to present to them. It will be pretty much the same view for everyone.

But the view is quite different for the person on the other side of the Web server—you, the Webmaster. There is a wide variety of server software from which to choose, each with its own quirks and capabilities. You have to decide which capabilities you need to run your Web site.

Likewise, though the field among Web browsers has been narrowed almost to two by Microsoft and Netscape, you need to decide what your baseline will be. Will your Web site require that only browsers equal in capability to Internet Explorer or Netscape will be supported, or will you make allowances for other, less-capable software?

Choosing a Web Server Package

The Web server software that you run on your site will be determined in large part by your operating system. None of the UNIX packages will run on Win-dows 95 or NT, and none of the servers available for Windows will run on UNIX. But you still have a lot of choices.

What will drive your decision next will be the range of capabilities that you want to support. For example:

  Do you care about server-side includes?
  What kind of access logging do you want to do?
  Does your Web site require tight security, or do you care about security at all?
  How much maintenance are you willing to perform on the site?

Because so much of a Web server package is tied directly to the operating system, let’s go over the “big three” again.

UNIX Servers

The Web servers that come with most standard UNIX distributions are similar in capabilities and setup. As you learned in Skill 2, setting up both the NCSA and CERN servers is a straightforward task.

Many UNIX packages—Linux among them—also include the Apache server, an interesting freeware application that many UNIX Webmasters like better than the old standby from NCSA.

If your server of choice isn’t in your distribution, the chances are good that you can find it somewhere on the World Wide Web and it will probably be free.

All of the servers mentioned here provide you with extensive logging capabilities and security configurations. They are UNIX applications, though, so you will be expected to do most of the work yourself.

The NCSA and Apache servers support the full range of server-side includes and they also give you the ability to selectively enable or disable the individual SSI commands. This is an important security consideration for Webmasters who, for example, want to be able to use the SSI #include statement but who would rather not allow visitors to run programs on the site with #exec.

Windows NT

The obvious—or at least most apparent—choice in Web server packages for Windows NT is the Internet Information Server, because it comes with NT Server 4.0.

However, the Sambar server also runs well under NT, as does Netscape’s Web server. Netscape is SSI-capable; Sambar promises to be soon.

As of this writing, IIS does not support server-side includes (except the #include directive), but it would be surprising if Microsoft didn’t fix this omission soon.

The logging capabilities of all of these servers are extensive and configurable. The security features mostly limit the directories into which you will allow visitors. The default setup for all of the packages creates a main directory for the server and subdirectories for CGI applications and HTML documents.

Windows 95

The ideal choice for a Web server on Windows 95 is Sambar, the freeware package to which you were introduced in Skill 2 and for which we’ve been doing exercises ever since.

Sambar’s server is so well done that it’s a wonder it’s being given away. As we’ve discussed, it makes an ideal test platform on Windows 95, but it could easily handle a real Web site running on Windows NT.

Supporting Web Browsers

Your visitors will choose their own Web browser software. Your choice will be which browsers to accommodate.

It’s an important decision. Microsoft and Netscape have made it less difficult to make a choice than in the past. However, you still have to keep in mind that Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer can do things that some older browsers cannot. If you make the two popular browsers your minimum requirement, you are effectively excluding visitors who use the older browsers.


TIP:  Both Netscape and Microsoft will gleefully allow you to place links on your Web pages to sites from which Navigator or Internet Explorer can be downloaded for free, thereby letting the visitors upgrade themselves. It’s one of the reasons the two browsers are in such widespread use.


EXERCISE:  The Sambar Server: Building Your Web Site

We didn’t cover any new Perl-CGI tricks in this skill, but that doesn’t mean you can’t add more goodies to your Sambar Web site.

You can go a long way toward increasing the capabilities of your Web site by giving your visitors the ability to use the latest browser software—if you don’t mind further expanding the influence Netscape and Microsoft in the process:

  Point your browser to www.netscape.com and www.microsoft.com to find out how you can include links on your home page to download Internet Explorer and Navigator.
  Create the links on your home page. You should be able to get graphical files for the links from the companies’ Web sites.

Moving On

We’ll get back into Perl programming and CGI applications in Skill 12, where you’ll learn about some advanced tricks.

Among other advanced Perl-CGI topics, you’ll cover looking up information in a database, mail systems, programming for the Internet, and using “cookies” to store information about your visitors.

Are You Experienced?

Now you can…

  decide on a computer platform that will run your Web server
  choose between the three most prevalent operating systems to run on your Web site
  pick the best Web server to run under your operating system
  decide which Web browsers will be supported at your site


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