Introduction to Networking for NonStop S-Series Servers

Introduction to Networking for HP NonStop S-Series Servers—520670-005
11-1
11 Internet Applications
The growth of the Internet and the World Wide Web is transforming the corporate
environment. In order to meet the challenges of this new environment, HP offers an
integrated family of Internet transaction processing servers and solutions for running
critical enterprise applications on the Web. HP WebServer solutions comprise a
comprehensive suite of products and services. This section provides a brief overview
of some of the HP WebServer products available on the NonStop system.
A Brief Look at the World Wide Web
The World Wide Web was defined by the CERN project in Switzerland and extended
by a number of groups, most notably the National Center for Supercomputing
Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois. The Web was developed to improve
communication over the Internet by allowing users to access and display platform-
independent documents containing ASCII text, graphics, sound, and video elements. In
addition to document access, the Web provides document-searching facilities and
interaction with user-written and vendor-provided scripts and servers.
The remainder of this subsection describes the following topics:
•
How Web servers and Web clients function in the Web technology client-server
architecture.
•
How HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is used to transfer data on the Web.
•
How HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is used to display formatted text and
create hyperlinks.
•
How the Common Gateway Interface (CGI) is used to provide an interface
between Web server applications.
•
How HP provides products to support the new number of emerging standards for
Web services, such as JavaScript, Extensible Markup Language (XML), and J2EE.
Web Servers and Clients
Web servers are server programs in the World Wide Web technology client-server
architecture. Web server functions can be divided into two parts:
•
A file server performs functions such as file transfer and buffering.
•
A message-switch facility allows messages from Web clients to be forwarded to
application programs.
Web clients (often called browsers) are the client programs in the Web technology
client-server architecture. They typically provide a number of facilities that vary from
one client to another. Web clients can communicate with a number of server types, not
just Web servers. This communication is typically initiated by following a hypertext link
in the form of a Universal Resource Locator (URL).