[lug] [OT] Web Server Question

[Sexton, George]

To browsers it will look pretty much the same. To spiders and other agents,
it depends upon how they are written.

To some extent, how well you can fake static HTML depends upon the engine
you are using. For example, take the LastModified date.

If you query the last modified date, and always get a -1 you can be pretty
sure that it's dynamically generated. Another would be whether your engine
sets the content length header or not. Finally, presence of cache-control
headers or Pragma headers would be another indication that it's dynamically
generated.

In Java servlets, you can write your own implementation of GetLastModified()
to return a specific value. Additionally, you can set the content length by
streaming to a byte buffer to get the overall length, and then writing that
buffer to the output stream.


George Sexton
MH Software, Inc.
Home of Connect Daily Web Calendar Software
http://www.mhsoftware.com/connectdaily.htm
Voice: 303 438 9585

-----Original Message-----
From: lug-admin at lug.boulder.co.us [mailto:lug-admin at lug.boulder.co.us]On
Behalf Of Dhruva B. Reddy
Sent: 16 October, 2002 3:50 PM
To: Boulder Linux Users Group
Subject: [lug] [OT] Web Server Question


Hi,

I have a question about how web servers work and really don't know where
to begin looking for the answer.

We are developing an application on Apache in Python using Albatross.
Our home page is generated dynamically.

My question:  From the viewpoint of a web agent (whether it is a
browser, spider, etc.), is there any difference between static content
and dymanically generated content?

My understanding is that if you hit, say http://www.foo.com/index.html,
you will get a file called 'index.html', which will look the same regardless
of whether the file is static or dynamically generated.

Any answers or direction would be greatly appreciated.

-d
--
"Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish
we didn't." Erica Jong (b. 1942); US author

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