WASD Hypertext Services - Technical Overview

1 - Introduction

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This document provides an technical overview of the WASD VMS HTTP server.  It is primarily written for use internal to WASD and assumes that perspective without apology.  Any additional usage is subordinate to its role within WASD.  The software has been written expressly for supporting an intra-organisational hypertext environment on a VMS platform (June 1997 note: since first writing this the industry has settled on the term intranet).  It too, is unreservedly tailored to this purpose and the requirements of WASD.  All programs were designed only to specifically comply with the requirements of VAX C and DEC C, within a DEC TCP/IP Services for VMS environment. 

The document assumes a basic understanding of the hypertext technologies and uses terms without explaining them (e.g. HTTP, HTML, URL, CGI, SSI, etc.) The reader is refered to documents specifically on these topics (these are often best consulted on-line, on the Internet WWW). 

Also see WASD Scripting Environment for information on using CGI, ISAPI, OSU, etc. scripting, and WASD Hypertext Environment for information on using the WASD VMS hypertext facilities.


Objectives

The primary impetus for an internal Web environment was a 1993 decision by Division management to make as much information as possible, both administrative and research, internally available on-line (to use the current term ... an intranet).  Early experimentation with a Gopher implementation soon made way for the obvious advantages of the emerging Web technology. 

It then became the objective of this author to make all of our systems' VMS-related resources available via HTTP and HTML, regardless of the underlying data or storage format.  An examination of the WASD package will show that this objective is substantially achieved. 


Reasons For a Local HTTPd

Reasons for developing a local HTTP server are few but compelling:


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