Web Server Programming

Presumed knowledge.

The Web Server Technology book is intended to support a senior level undergraduate subject. Students are presumed to already have reasonable knowledge of the workings of the Internet, WWW, HTML, and databases.

Obviously, if you've reached this site then you know how to use the World Wide Web. If you aren't confident that you really know how the Internet works, then the How Stuff Works site may help! This site has numerous short technical articles (really aimed at senior school students); these articles include:

Yahoo has a large collection of links to other introductory materials. Yahoo also has links to many sources on CGI programming

The web sites that you build for exercises will include static HTML pages with text, graphics, and maybe a few "dynamic" features implemented using Javascript. Such static pages are best created with a program such as FrontPage; such programs hide all details of HTML coding. But you do need to know how to use HTML to layout a page, and how to include simple Javascript for checking data entry. The dynamic pages that you create in your server programs will have to combine dynamically generated text with predefined fragments of HTML and content text.

Appendix A of the text has a brief introduction to HTML and Javascript; the examples from the appendix are available. There are numerous more detailed guides to both HTML and Javascript available on the web. A good place to start looking for anything Internet related is Internet.com. W3Schools has tutorials on HTML, style sheets, and Javascript. The WDVL site has additional collections of links to HTML, style sheets, and JavaScript tutorials.

Most of the examples and suggested exercises in the book make simple use of relational databases. It is assumed that students do have some database experience; but the level is fairly low. Typically, for these exercises a database will comprise a single table and the operations will be limited to insertion of additional data and simple searches of existing records. A few links to tutorials on SQL, and database programming with Perl, PHP, Java are supplied; the page also has links to the main database sites from where you can download database systems and/or documentation.