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Perl CGl Programming: No experience required.
Making Choices about Servers and BrowsersWhen visitors come to your Web site, all they see is what youve 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 serveryou, 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 PackageThe 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:
Because so much of a Web server package is tied directly to the operating system, lets 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 packagesLinux among themalso 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 isnt 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 obviousor at least most apparentchoice 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 Netscapes 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 didnt 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 weve been doing exercises ever since. Sambars server is so well done that its a wonder its being given away. As weve 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 BrowsersYour visitors will choose their own Web browser software. Your choice will be which browsers to accommodate. Its 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.
Moving On Well get back into Perl programming and CGI applications in Skill 12, where youll learn about some advanced tricks. Among other advanced Perl-CGI topics, youll 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
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