NCSA httpd for Windows Demonstration

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Demonstration Checklist

This demonstration page exercises many of the capabilities of your server and browser. Here's a checklist you can use to verify your setup:
The 2.0a4 alpha version of NCSA Mosaic has display problems, particularly with forms. If you encounter display problems, try scrolling up and down in the document, or refetching it. If the window remains completely blank, stop and restart Mosaic.

Introduction

Your new server has the capabilities you need to produce powerful yet easy to use presentations and services. In order to make it as easy as possible for you to get online as a Web information provider, your package contains the basic server, plus a few pre-configured add-on utilities. Taken in combination with NCSA Mosaic, your new server can support the following features:

Basic Document Retrieval

This is the most basic, yet most often used, function that your server provides. When the user clicks on a hot-spot, Mosaic sends a request to the server and the server returns the requested document.

Here is a plain text document

Here is a hypertext document

Here is a GIF image

Here is an audio clip

You can use an image as a hot-spot as well.


Document Based Queries

NCSA Mosaic has a feature that permits a hypertext document to trigger display of a "query field". When the user enters something into the query field and presses ENTER, Mosaic sends a special request to the server. You can set up your server to offer query documents and process queries by using the back-end scripting facilities. In this way, you can offer services that provide searching databases, etc.

Click here to display the sample query document.


Form Based Queries

NCSA Mosaic has the ability to display "form" information encoded into a hypertext document. The user can fill in fields, select from lists, set and clear options with checkboxes and option buttons, and more.

Here is a simple form. Fill in the field and select an option, then click the "Search" button. You will see a plain text "stub" response showing what would ordinarily be submitted to the database search engine:

Employee Locator

Search on

which

the following:

Case-sensitive


Form Based Submission

The same mechanism used to send the query specifications in the previous example may be used to submit data to some sort of back-end. This example uses a form to provide an order-entry service.

Fill in the orer-entry form and click the "order" button. The results you see will be a plain text dump of the raw order data as it would be given to the order-entry system.

Godzilla's Pizza -- Internet Delivery Service

At present, we accept internet orders only for medium (13") size pizzas.

Type in your street address:

Type in your phone number:

Which toppings would you like?

  1. Pepperoni.
  2. Sausage.
  3. Anchovies.
To order your pizza, press this button: .

Directory Tree Navigation

This feature of NCSA httpd permits the server to display a directory tree accessible to the server and let users browse through the (sub)directories, and retrieve files within the tree. In addition, as server administrator, you can create text descriptions for files to assist your users in locating information in files.

If security is not an issue, you could set up your server to "serve up its C drive", in which case Mosaic users could retrieve any file on the server's main disk.

For this demo, I have created a small directory tree with some useless documents in it. Have a look and you'll get the idea. Clicking on the Parent Directory entry at the top of the demo tree will take you back to this demo document. Can you figure out how that happens?


Access Control

Your server has the ability to provide fine-grain control of access to documents and scripts. Access can be controlled by user, by group, by client host domain name, or any combination of these. In addition, access can be controlled at the server level, or at the individual directory level, or a combination of both.

Windows Mosaic (V2.0a4) remembers the username and password you enter. If you type in the correct username and password, you will be permitted to access the document, and you won't be able to try an incorrect combination until you exit and restart Mosaic. I suggest you start with the wrong username and/or password. Then when you try again, you'll get a confusing "failure" alert. Choose the try again button and you can type in another (correct) username and password.
This document can be accessed only by user fido with password bones.

Image Maps

Thanks to Casey Barton (see address at end), your server has been pre-configured with the ability to process clicks within an inline image and perform actions based on the location of the click. This is called "image map" support. With it, for example, you can create a graphical map of a complex set of Web pages and let your users navigate visually. Obviously, many other clever things can be done with image maps.

Here is an inline GIF image. Click in it and see what happens.

P.S. The image mapper is a Windows program and uses the Windows CGI interface. See the demo below.


Experimental Windows CGI

In order for this demonstration to run, you must have Visual Basic V3 installed on the server's system. At a minimum, VBRUN300.DLL must be available.

The back-end is a test program that produces various reports as to the CGI environment it gets from the server. The reports are in HTML format. The sources to this test program are in the /cgi-src directory, plus a "usage" page in the server document root. The usage page is returned if no test selector is specified (as "extra path" info).

The URL to get the usage page is:

/cgi-win/cgitest.exe
Try it now. It should be self-explanatory. For more information, see the Windows CGI documentation.
Robert B. Denny <rdenny@netcom.com>
Casey Barton <cbarton@clark.dgim.doc.ca>