What is Microsoft IIS Web server?

Category: General Info

iis

 

IIS (Internet Information Server) IIS (Internet Information Server) is a group of Internet servers (including a Web or Hypertext Transfer Protocol server and a File Transfer Protocol server) with additional capabilities for Microsoft’s Windows NT and Windows 2000 Server operating systems.

Internet Information Services (IIS, formerly Internet Information Server) is an extensible web server created by Microsoft for use with Windows NT family. IIS supports HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, FTPS, SMTP and NNTP. IIS is Microsoft’s entry to compete in the Internet server market that is also addressed by Apache, Sun Microsystems, O’Reilly, and others. With IIS, Microsoft includes a set of programs for building and administering Web sites, a search engine, and support for writing Web-based applications that access databases. Microsoft points out that IIS is tightly integrated with the Windows NT and 2000 Servers in a number of ways, resulting in faster Web page serving.

IIS can serve both standard HTML webpages and dynamic webpages, such as ASP.NET applications and PHP pages. When a visitor accesses a page on a static website, IIS simply sends the HTML and associated images to the user’s browser. When a page on a dynamic is accessed, IIS runs any applications and processes any scripts contained in the page, then sends the resulting data to the user’s browser.

In IIS, you can create sites, applications, and virtual directories to share information with users over the Internet, an intranet, or an extranet. Although these concepts existed in earlier versions of IIS, several changes in IIS 7 and above affect the definition and functionality of these concepts. Most importantly, sites, applications, and virtual directories now work together in a hierarchical relationship as the basic building blocks for hosting online content and providing online services. IIS is a popular option for commercial websites, since it offers many advanced features and is supported by Microsoft. However, it also requires require a commercial license and the pricing increases depending on the number of users. Therefore, Apache HTTP Server, which is open source and free for unlimited users, remains the most popular web server software.

A typical company that buys IIS can create pages for Web sites using Microsoft’s Front Page product (with its WYSIWYG user interface). Web developers can use Microsoft’s Active Server Page (ASP) technology, which means that applications – including ActiveX controls – can be imbedded in Web pages that modify the content sent back to users. Developers can also write programs that filter requests and get the correct Web pages for different users by using Microsoft’s Internet Server Application Program Interface (ISAPI) interface. ASPs and ISAPI programs run more efficiently than common gateway interface (CGI) and server-side include (SSI) programs, two current technologies. (However, there are comparable interfaces on other platforms.)

What is IIS stand for?

IIS is an acronym that may stand for: Internet Information Services, a set of Internet-based services for servers using Microsoft Windows.

 

What is an IIS Application?

An IIS (Internet Information Server) application is a Visual Basic application that lives on a Web server and responds to requests from the browser. An IIS application uses HTML to present its user interface and uses compiled Visual Basic code to process requests and respond to events in the browser. To the user, an IIS application appears to be made up of a series of HTML pages. To the developer, an IIS application is made up of a special type of object called a web class that in turn contains a series of resources called web items. The web class acts as the central functional unit of the application, processing data from the browser and sending information to the users. You define a series of procedures that determine how the web class responds to these requests. The web items are the HTML pages and other data the web class can send to the browser in response to a request.