User manual

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Web Technologies Overview
Become familiar with web technologies and understand
the major components before setting up your services
and sites.
Web technologies in Mac OS X Server offer an integrated Internet server solution. Web
technologies—also called web service in this guide—are easy to set up and manage,
so you don’t need to be an experienced web administrator to set up multiple websites
and configure and monitor your web server.
Web technologies in Mac OS X Server are based on Apache, an open-source HTTP web
server. A web server responds to requests for HTML webpages stored on your site.
Open-source software allows anyone to view and modify the source code to make
changes and improvements. This has led to Apache’s widespread use, making it the
most popular web server on the Internet today.
Web administrators can use Server Admin to administer web technologies without
knowing anything about advanced settings or configuration files. Web administrators
proficient with Apache can choose to administer web technologies using Apache’s
advanced features.
In addition, web technologies in Mac OS X Server include a high-performance, front-
end cache that improves performance for websites that use static HTML pages. With
this cache, static data doesn’t need to be accessed by the server each time it is
requested.
Web service also includes support for Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning,
known as WebDAV. With WebDAV capability, your client users can check out webpages,
make changes, and then check the pages back in while the site is running. In addition,
the WebDAV command set is rich enough that client computers with Mac OS X
installed can use a WebDAV-enabled web server as if it were a file server.
Since web service in Mac OS X Server is based on Apache, you can add advanced
features with plug-in modules. Apache modules allow you to add support for Simple
Object Access Protocol (SOAP), Java, and CGI languages such as Python.
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