Web servers dish out billions of web pages a day. They tell you the weather, load up your online shopping carts, and let you find long-lost high-school buddies. Web servers are the workhorses of the World Wide Web. In this chapter, we:

·         Survey the many different types of software and hardware web servers.

·         Describe how to write a simple diagnostic web server in Perl.

·         Explain how web servers process HTTP transactions, step by step.

Where it helps to make things concrete, our examples use the Apache web server and its configuration options.

 

Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP)