Chameleon Personal Web Server for Windows 3.1


Getting Started With Your Own Web Server

Welcome to the NetManage sample Web. This has been designed to help you get started with setting up your own World Wide Web server. The Web server can serve HTML and other documents, images, sound files and even movies to Web clients like Chameleon Mosaic+. To achieve this, you need to first create your own Web. The following sections will lead you through the sample Web to clarify the details involved in setting up your Web server. We have even created three sample home pages showing how you can make a home page for a small business or your family.

The NetManage Personal Web Server has two features normally found in high end servers forms support and image map support. Check these two pages for examples of how to use these features.


What is a Web?

A Web is a collection of HTML documents and other files that you want to serve to Web clients. This collection of documents and files resides in your Windows filesystem. The starting point of this collection is referred to as the Document Root Directory in the Chameleon Personal Web Server. You can have subdirectories under the Document Root Directory and you can place the files that you want to serve in both the Document Root Directory and in these subdirectories. The important point is that your Web is made up of the Document Root Directory and the subdirectories therein and only these are visible to Web clients. The other parts of the filesystem that are outside the Web are invisible to the Web clients. This is a security feature provided by the Web server.

Sample Web

NetManage has created a sample Web that you can peruse to get started with setting up your own Web server. The files in this sample Web are located in the Document Root Directory specified in the Personal Web Server Configuration dialog box when you bring up the server for the very first time. You can look at these files to see how exactly they are composed. This will give you ideas for creating your own Web files and for setting up your own Web.

Click here to see a primer on composing HTML documents.

Here's an embedded image that you must be really familiar with.

Here's the same embedded image again, but this time you can click on it and make it do something. Try clicking on it.


Personal Web Server Features

The Personal Web Server has two features that are handy in dealing with directories. Typically, users request a file when they specify a URL to a Web client, for e.g., http://machine@company.com/homepage.htm. In this case, the Web server will serve the file to the Web client if the file exists. Now consider the case where the user specifies a directory to the Web client, for e.g., http://machine@company.com/directory. The Personal Web Server handles this case in one of two ways:

Setting Up Your Own Web

Perusing the files that make up the sample Web can help you understand how to set up your own Web documents and other files. Once you have composed your Web files, you are ready to reconfigure the Web server to make it serve files from your Web rather than the sample Web. All you need to do is to specify the Document Root Directory in the Personal Web Server Configuration dialog box. This dialog box can be activated from the Configure... menu option in the Settings menu. Recall that the Document Root Directory is the directory where your Web starts. Specify this and click OK in the dialog box. The Web server is now ready to serve your documents and files from your very own Web. (Note: You can change the other parameters in the dialog box if you want to, but this is not necessary.)