what is the Role of IIS

In this post i am sharing you what is IIS and their roles and how it works?. Internet Information Services (IIS) is a flexible, general-purpose web server from Microsoft that runs on Windows systems to serve requested HTML pages or files.

An IIS web server accepts requests from remote client computers and returns the appropriate response. This basic functionality allows web servers to share and deliver information across local area networks, such as corporate intranets, and wide area networks, such as the internet.

User Experience:

Sharing information on the Internet is a simple process of a user (or client) using a Web browser such as Internet Explorer (IE) to request a file from a Web server such as IIS.

The Web server sends the browser a response that contains the requested file as well as headers that contain connection information. The Web browser uses the HTML tags in the file to properly format and display the data in the file. A Web browser that displays HTML has the capacity to mimic any user interface.

Role of IIS:

• IIS fulfills the role of the Web server, responding to requests for files from Web clients such as IE, and logging activity.
• IIS maintains information about the location of content files, what security identities have access to those files, how content files are separated into applications, and what URLs are mapped to those applications. This information can be configured manually or programmatically by using one of the IIS administration technologies.
• IIS can communicate with software such as Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Visual Studio.NET, and Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV) to make Web content creation fast and easy. Web content can be created to take advantage of one of the IIS development technologies.

What is Web Server? with examples

In this post you will know what is the meaning of web server and their description with examples. In 1989 Sir Tim Berners-Lee proposed a new project to his employer CERN, with the goal of easing the exchange of information between scientists by using a hypertext system. The project resulted in Berners-Lee writing two programs in 1990:

1. A browser called WorldWideWeb
2. The world's first web server, later known as CERN httpd, which ran on NeXTSTEP

A web server is a computer that runs websites. It's a computer program that distributes web pages as they are requisitioned. The basic objective of the web server is to store, process and deliver web pages to the users. This intercommunication is done using Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). These web pages are mostly static content that includes HTML documents, images, style sheets, test etc. Apart from HTTP, a web server also supports SMTP (Simple Mail transfer Protocol) and FTP (File Transfer Protocol) protocol for emailing and for file transfer and storage.  

The main job of a web server is to display the website content. If a web server is not exposed to the public and is used internally, then it is called Intranet Server. When anyone requests for a website by adding the URL or web address on a web browser’s (like Chrome or Firefox) address bar (like http://learnprogramingbyluckysir.blogspot.com), the browser sends a request to the Internet for viewing the corresponding web page for that address. A Domain Name Server (DNS) converts this URL to an IP Address , which in turn points to a Web Server.

The Web Server is requested to present the content website to the user’s browser. All websites on the Internet have a unique identifier in terms of an IP address. This Internet Protocol address is used to communicate between different servers across the Internet. These days, Apache server is the most common web server available in the market. Apache is an open source software that handles almost 70 percent of all websites available today. Most of the web-based applications use Apache as their default Web Server environment. Another web server that is generally available is Internet Information Service (IIS). IIS is owned by Microsoft.

Examples: Apache Server, IIS

Watch Video: Define Web Server?