Chapter 4 Configuring Web Servers and Web sites

The Personal Web Server

The Personal Web Server runs as an application on your computer. Once you start it, it runs in the background, automatically handling your Web browser's requests for local Web pages (and supplying database content for any pages produced with Dynamo).

Accessing a Web site using the Personal Web Server

Your Web browser normally goes out onto the Internet (or your organization's intranet) to get Web pages. When you run the Personal Web Server, your browser can get Web pages from your own computer as well.

These local pages can be either static documents or Dynamo documents, since the Personal Web Server automatically generates Web pages from Dynamo templates and scripts.

Testing Web sites

When you are creating or changing a Web site that contains Dynamo content, you may find it easiest to create all or part of the site on your own computer. The site is stored in your own Dynamo database or in the file system.

Using the Personal Web Server, you can then point your Web browser to this local site and test your changes, without disrupting your organization's production Web site.

For Dynamo sites that are stored in an Adaptive Server Anywhere database, moving a site to a server platform is a simple matter of copying the appropriate database and log file to the new location. For file-based Web sites, simply copy the files.

Using the Web offline

To use the Web, normally you must be online--that is, you must have a live Internet connection for your Web browser. If you are offline, normally, there is no Web server to supply your browser with Web content. This is not the case with PowerDynamo.

If you have some Web content already stored on your computer, you can point your browser to this content by using the Personal Web Server. You can then navigate these local pages as you would normally navigate the Web if you were online.

Your offline Web content can be a mixture of static and Dynamo documents stored on your computer. It can be stored as conventional files copied from the Internet, or stored as part of a Dynamo database replicated automatically from an Adaptive Server Enterprise or Adaptive Server Anywhere central database using SQL Remote. The Personal Web Server handles these details and presents the results to your Web browser.

Preparing to use the Personal Web Server

To use the Personal Web Server:

For a database-hosted Web site, create an ODBC Data Source Name (this step is not necessary if you are using an Open Client connection to connect to the database).

For information on creating an ODBC Data Source Name see "Creating a Web site [Adaptive Server Anywhere]" or "Creating a Web site [Adaptive Server Enterprise]".
For a database-hosted Web site, use Sybase Central to create a connection profile. See "Creating a connection profile for your Web site".
Configure the Application Server by defining mappings from a URL to a Dynamo site.

For information about configuring the Personal Web Server, see "Configuring Web sites".

TCP/IP required
Web browsers require a TCP/IP protocol stack to communicate with a Web server, even if it is on the same machine with no intervening network. You must have TCP/IP installed to use the Personal Web Server.

Starting the Personal Web Server

To start the Personal Web Server on your computer:

To start the Personal Web Server from Sybase Central, click on the Utilities folder in the left pane of Sybase Central.
Double-click on the Personal Web Server icon in the right pane.

The Personal Web Server on the desktop
Under Windows 95 and Windows NT 4.0, the Personal Web Server appears only as a small "tray icon" at the opposite end of the taskbar from the Start menu.

Figure 4-1: Personal Web server icon

Viewing a local Dynamo document

From a browser, you must identify, by means of the server part of a URL, that a document is to be found using a Web server running on your machine. The server part of a URL identifies a particular computer, and the Web server running on that computer can then receive and process the request. You can identify your own machine in a URL in one of the following ways:

Use the special name localhost for the server part of the URL. For example, the following URL accesses a document on the local machine:
```
http://localhost/Site/sample.stm
```
This is the recommended method.
Use the IP number of your machine. For example:
```
http://123.45.54.211/Site/sample.stm
```
Use the name of your machine. For example:
```
http://test_machine/Site/sample.stm
```

Figure 4-2: URL format

Web content may be on other machines
The Personal Web Server connects to a database-hosted Web site via an ODBC client/server connection. The documents you access using the Personal Web Server may be located on an Adaptive Server Enterprise or Adaptive Server Anywhere database on a different machine on the network.