MySQL and Perl for the Web

Configuring Apache

Many people think of a Web server primarily as something that services Web page requests by opening files containing static HTML pages and sending their contents to clients. That is one thing a Web server does, of course, but it’s not the only one. Another is to execute programs that generate pages. When you use Apache for this, you’re generating dynamic content, because the pages generated by a program can differ each time the program runs. (As a trivial example, consider a program that simply displays the current time of day; it generates different output whenever the time changes.)

Serving dynamic content is more difficult than serving static pages because it involves writing programs to produce the content. It also involves ...