Re: Web server info

You got it right Vern. The distinctions are difficult to maintain because there are increasing more "application serving" extensions to web servers so it is sometimes hard to tell them apart from Application severs but you got the basics. Web servers primary design focuses on serving HTML. App servers usually have quite a bit of pre-processing or post processing activity that may include DB I/O, calculation logic, template rendering and the like. The App servers generally have a web server built in since the final result is usually HTML.
I have a Tomcat server that has one or two sites that are served directly to the web but in most cases the Tomcat server is "behind" Apache where the HTML is passed between the Tomcat and Apache servers. That can give you some more control and integrate "static" pages with more dynamic server application data (although there are several ways to skin that cat).

PHP is in the middle. Apache hands off the page rendering and DB IO to the PHP processor, much like Tomcat, except that PHP doesn't have a web server (that I am aware of). PHP is usually run as an Apache module (like a plug in) where Apache recognizes the PHP stuff by it's file extension and hands it off to the PHP module to process (usually returning HTML).

Many other subtle differences but you basically to nailed it.

Pete Helgren

Vernon Hamberg wrote:

Pat

My simple understanding!!

Apache is a web server - it serves web pages - HTML stuff.

Tomcat is an application server - it runs Java servlets and java server pages that often or usually create HTML that a web server sends to your browser.

I see in a wiki article that .NET is considered an application server environmet - ASPs are the web part of it, I think.

Now that I've displayed my ignorance!!

HTH
Vern

At 09:11 AM 11/13/2007, you wrote:

What's the difference in the two...generally speaking,
between the Apache server and Tomcat ?

After putting an example up yesterday, I think my confusion comes
with all those AIX terms I see used. I had to start the LDAP server
but I had no idea why I needed to do that. That is chock full of very
unfamilar terms. The InfoCenter is a very poor excuse for a good set of
books on the subject.

After a great deal of reading and experiments, I finally got the Apache
server running and the IBM example "Phone Directory" up and going.

Waaaay too much tweaking and twisting to get something that simple
up and going.

Did I lean anything ...probably.