A Web server can be either a computer program or a computer running a program that is responsible for accepting HTTP requests from clients, serving back HTTP responses along with data contents, which usually are web pages such as HTML documents and linked objects on it.
How does it works ?
A Web server handles the HTTP protocol. When the Web server receives an HTTP request, it responds with an HTTP response, such as sending back an HTML page. To process a request, a Web server may respond with a static HTML page or image, send a redirect, or delegate the dynamic response generation to some other program such as CGI scripts, JSPs (JavaServer Pages), servlets, ASPs (Active Server Pages), server-side JavaScripts, or some other server-side technology. Whatever their purpose, such server-side programs generate a response, most often in HTML, for viewing in a Web browser.
Web server examples are :
- Apache
- Microsoft’s Internet Information Server (IIS)
E.g: Let’s say that you get a call from a friend who says, “I just read a great crm features provided by vembu ! Type in this URL and check it out.
It’s at “https://www.bdrsuite.com/vembu-crm-suite-features/” So you type that URL into your browser and press return. And no matter where in the world that URL lives, the page pops up on your screen
Working Mechanism for the above example:
Here, the browser(client) breaks the URL into three parts:
- The protocol (“http”)
- The server name (“www.vembu.com“)
- The file name (“vembu-crm-suite-features”)
The browser so called client communicates with a name server to translate the server name “www.vembu.com” into an IP Address, which it uses to connect to the web server machine. The browser then forms a connection to the web server at that IP address on port 80.
Following the HTTP protocol, the browser sends a GET request to the web server, asking for the file “http://www.vembu.com/vembu-crm-suite-features”
The web server then sends the HTML text for the web page to the browser. The browser read the HTML tags and formats the web page onto your screen.
Go questions? Email us at: vembu-support@vembu.com for answers.
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