Good Webserver for Out-Of-Box Deployment

Question

The company I work for is starting a project that will probably require a web-server and database to be deployed on the clients system. There are a couple of reasons why we want to ship with a webserver:

• We need to send and receive data between machines, and we don't want to force customers to setup a network file-system
• We need to have some sort of GUI for this system, and it has to be cross-platform and cross-machine
• Most of our clients are probably going to want to write web-interfaces to our system, and it would be nice to give them some working examples

We are scared about the idea of shipping a system with Apache. That sounds like it would be a support nightmare. We want to ship on Linux and Windows, and we want something that we can basically deploy automatically.

Has anyone ever developed or used a product that deployed on top of a web-server? What options are there? What sort of frameworks were used?

Answer 1

It sounds like rather than deploying a web server to the client that you should take a look at a client server type set up where the client also hosts a port so that it too can act as a server. This will allow two way communications. This will then allow you to have full control over what is delivered and any data communications or document transfers can be supported directly via your implementation. I suggest using C# but only because that is all I have lived in for so long now. It can run in both a windows and linux world equally well. Depending on what you need for storing data you can use sql express on the client or an xml document store. The server end can utilize what ever database flavor you are used to working with or that your company can afford. I am a Microsoft guy so my preference is generally SQL Server!

Take a look here for several examples on how to set up a two way communication.

Answer 2

Apache Friends XAMPP prehaps?

Answer 3

Lighttpd is a good choice. It's small, multiplatform and light weight. It's also BSD licensed in case you need to modify some source code without worrying about copyleft.

As for a database, SQLite is also another lightweight client.