How did people build web sites before there were web/application servers?

Question

I just read Joel Spolsky's article, Up the tata without a tutu, where Joel says,

In those days, there were no application servers.

and

There really weren't any other app servers in those days.

So basically, how did people write web apps in those days? Did they write their own implementations of web servers and app servers? And when did companies start coming out with 'standard' web/app servers like Tomcat, JBoss, etc? And can people also share any anecdotes related to this, if there any any? Links to websites also appreciated...

Answer 1

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

I still have a few C-based web apps on my web site, including a fairly primitive forum system. It was pretty painful stuff, looking back - but it worked.

Answer 2

People had web servers - but not application servers as we understand them today. Early web sites were static HTML, and a little later came CGI, which let you send the HTML output of a program (typically perl or C) to the user's browser.

Answer 3

Ah, this takes me back. Yes, the very first web applications required writing your own web server. the first ones, like CERN HTTPd, where pretty straightforward programs: they listened on a port for basic connection requests, parsed out the file path, and returned a static file.

Pretty soon after that, people figured out how to fork/exec a program from the HTTP daemon that generated the HTML file, instead of serving it from a static file. Some of these were simple C programs; Perl became popular as well. But something like a banking system (I worked on one of these) would fork the program when a session started, then connect to an existing back end through something like CICS to get data, then generate the output using something like fprintf to send text to the socket connection.

App servers actually arrived when people realized they were writing repeated chunks of code that needed to talk to the back end "data layer" or "persistence layer" and to the front end web server.