How did people create websites before application web servers appeared?

Question

I just read Joel Spolsky's article, Upstairs tata without a pack , where Joel says,

In those days there were no application servers.

and

There really was no other server application in those days.

So basically, how do people write web applications in those days? Do they write their own versions of web servers and application servers? And when did companies start releasing "standard" web application servers such as Tomcat, JBoss, etc.? And can people share any jokes related to this, if any? Links to sites also rated ...

Answer 1

Ah, that brings me back. Yes, the first web applications required writing their own web server. the former, for example, CERN HTTPd , where there are fairly simple programs: they listened to the port for basic connection requests, parsed the file path and returned a static file.

Pretty soon after that, people figured out how to fork / execute a program from the HTTP daemon that generated the HTML file, instead of serving it from a static file. Some of them were simple C programs; Perl has become popular. But something like a banking system (I worked on one of them) deployed the program when the session started, and then connected to the existing back end via something like CICS to get the data, then generate the output using something like fprintf to send text to socket.

Application servers really arrived when people realized that they were writing repeating snippets of code that were supposed to talk to the “data layer” in the background or the “level of stability” and the front-end web server.

Answer 2

Your web server will call a CGI script, usually (in my experience), written in Perl or C.

I still have several C-based web applications on my website, including a rather primitive forum system. It was pretty painful stuff, looking back, but it worked.

Answer 3

People had web servers, but not application servers, as we understand them today. The early websites were static HTML, and a bit later CGI appeared, which allows you to send the HTML output of a program (usually perl or C) to the user's browser.