What is World Wide Web ?

 

World Wide Web (WWW)

 

World Wide Web is also known as the Web. It is a collection of websites or web pages stored on web servers and connected to local computers through the Internet. These websites contain text, images, audios, videos, etc. Users can access the content of these sites from any part of the world over the Internet using their devices such as computers, laptops, cell phones, etc. The WWW, along with Internet, enables the retrieval and display of text and media to your device.

 

History of World Wide Web

 

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, a British computer scientist, developed the World Wide Web in 1989. After graduating from Oxford University, he became a software engineer at CERN (European Council for Nuclear Research).

 

According to Tim, during those days, there was different information on different computers, hence you had to log on to different computers to get it. At times, you had to learn a different program for each computer. Often it was just easier to go and ask people when they were having coffee.

 

Tim could foresee the problem; millions of computers were being connected together through Internet. In March 1989, Tim laid out his vision how these computers could share information by exploiting an emerging technology called hypertext in a document called "Information Management: A Proposal".

 

His initial proposal was not immediately accepted. By October 1990, Tim had written the three fundamental technologies that remain the foundation of today's web:

 

Ø HTML (HyperText Mark-up Language): The mark-up (formatting) language for the web.

 

Ø URI (Uniform Resource Identifier): A unique address used to identify each resource on the web. It is also commonly called a URL (Uniform Resource Locator).

 

Ø HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol): Allows for the retrieval of linked resources from across the web.

 

Tim Berners-Lee also wrote the first web page editor/browser (World Wide Web.app) and the first web server (httpd). By the end of 1990, the first web page was served on the open Internet. In 1991, people outside of CERN were invited to join this new web community.

 

In 1994 Tim Berners-Lee moved from CERN to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to found the World Wic Web Consortium (W3C), an international community dedicated to developing open web standards. He is the Director of W3C till date.

 

Difference between World Wide Web and Internet

 

According to some people they use the terms World Wide Web and Internet interchangeably. Well, both these terms have a significant difference. Internet is entirely different from WWW. It is a worldwide network of devices like computers, laptops, tablets, etc. connected through copper wires, fiber optics and even wireless connections. It comprises of smaller networks comprising of LAN, MAN or WAN. It enables users to send emails to other users and chat with them online. For example, when you send an email or chat with someone online, you are using the Internet.

 

On the other hand, the World Wide Web enables the exchange of information and consists of the interlinked collection of the webpages or websites having URLs and linked by the hyperlinks and accessed by web browsers.

 

Web Server

Internet works on a Client Server model. A client is a computer on a network that requests services from another computer on the Internet. A server is a computer that receives requests from client computer, When the request reaches the correct web server (hardware), the HTTP server (software) accepts request, finds the requested document (if it doesn't then a 404 response is returned), and sends it back to the browser, also through HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol).

 

For example, to open the website of Prachi India, you will open the web browser, type its website address (URL) and press the Enter key, Now, your computer will get connected to the web server that hosts the Prachi India website and requests it to share. The web server will accept the request, fetches it and sends it to your browser.

 

A web server is always connected to the Internet. A web server thus can be referred to hardware or software, or both of them working together.

 

On the hardware front, a web server is a computer that stores web server software and a website's files for example, HTML documents, images, CSS stylesheets and JavaScript files. It is connected to the Internet and supports physical data interchange with other devices connected to the web. On the software front, a web server includes an HTTP software that understands URLs (web addresses) and HTTP (the protocol your browser uses to view webpages). It can be retrieved through the domain names (like prachiindia. com) of websites it stores and delivers the content to the end-user's device.

 

Different types of web servers

 

In the market the different types of web servers available are:

 

IIS is a Microsoft product. This server has all the features just like Apache. It is not an open source software. Since it is developed and maintained by Microsoft therefore, it works with all the Windows operating system platforms.

 

Apache Software Foundation developed one of the most popular open source software, web servers in the world. It supports almost all operating systems including Linux, Unix, Windows, FreeBSD, Mac OS X and more. It is more stable than any other web servers.

 

Nginx web server

 

Nginx is a free open source web server which includes IMAP/POP3 proxy server. It is known for its high performance, stability, simple configuration and low resource usage. The web server use event-driven architecture to handle requests which are more scalable and uses small predictable amounts of memory under load,

 

LightSpeed web server

 

LiteSpeed (LSWS) a commercial web server, is a high-performance Apache dropin replacement. It is compatible with most common apache features and can load apache configuration files directly.

 

LSWS is the 4th most popular web server on the Internet.

 

Know More

 

To publish a website, you require either a static or a dynamic web server.

 

A static web server consists of a computer (hardware) with an HTTP server (software). It is called static because the server sends its hosted files as-is to your browser.

 

A dynamic web server consists of a static web server and an additional software, an application server and a database. It is called dynamic because the application server updates the hosted files before sending them to your browser via the HTTP server.

 

For example, to produce the final webpages you see in the browser, the application server might fill an HTML template with contents from a database. For example, Wikipedia have many thousands of webpages, with a few HTML templates and a huge database. This arrangement makes it easier and faster to maintain and deliver the content.