In my opinion, web server is responsible to deliver content to client. If it is static content like pictures and static html document, web server just deliver them as bitstream directly. If it is some dynamic content that is generated during processing client’s request, the web server will not generate the conetnt itself but call some external proram to genearte the content.
AFAIK, this kind of dynamice content generation technologies include the following:
-
CGI
-
ISAPI
-
…
And from here, I noticed that:
…In IIS 7, modules replace ISAPI
filters…
Is there any others? Could anyone help me complete the above list and elabrate on or show some links to their evolution? I think it would be very helpful to understand application such as IIS, TomCat, and Apache.
I once wrote a small CGI program, and though it serves as a content generator, it is still nothing but a normal standalone program. I call it normal because the CGI program has a main() entry point. But with the recenetly technology like ASP.NET, I am not writing complete program, but only some class library. Why does such radical change happens?
Many thanks.
well, the biggest missing piece in your question is that you can have the webserver generating the content dynamically as well. This is common with most platforms outside of PHP and Perl. You often set that website behind apache or nginx used as a proxy, but it doesn’t “call an external progam” in any reasonable sense, it forwards the http request to the proxied server. This is mostly done so you can have multiple sites on the same server, and also so you can have apache/nginx protect you against incorrect requests.
But sure, we can, for the sake of the question, say that “proxying” is a way to call an external program. 🙂
Another way to “call the external program” is Pythons WSGI, where you do call a permanently running server. So again you don’t start an external program, it’s more like calling the module in ASP (although it’s a separate program, not a module, but you don’t start it with every request, you use an API).
The change from calling external programs as in CGI to calling modules like in ASP.NET, process with WGI or proxying to another webserver happened because with CGI you have to start a new prpogram for each request. The PERL/PHP interpreter needs to be laoded into memory, and all modules they use as well. This quickly becomes very heavy and process/memory intensive.
Therefore, to be able to use bigger systems that are permanently running, other techniques have been developed. Most of them are platform/language dependent, and the only one that is platform independent is really to make a complete webserver and then use apache/nginx as a proxy in front (in which case the apache/nginx strictly isn’t necessary any more).
I hope this cleared things up a bit.