Microsoft Personal Web Server
Microsoft Personal Web Server (PWS) is a scaled-down web server software forWindows operating systems. It has fewer features than Microsoft's Internet Information Services (IIS) and its functions have been superceded by IIS and Visual Studio. Microsoft officially supports PWS on Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows 98 SE, and Windows NT 4.0. Prior to the release of Windows 2000, PWS was available as a free download as well as included on the Windows distribution CDs. PWS 4.0 was the last version and it can be found on the Windows 98 CD and the Windows NT 4.0 Option Pack.
Since Windows 2000, PWS was replaced by IIS as a standard Windows component. Windows Me and Windows XP Home Edition support neither PWS nor IIS, although PWS can be installed on Windows Me. In other editions of Windows XP, IIS is included as standard.
Before Visual Studio 2005, PWS was useful in developing web applications on the localhost before deploying to a production web server. The IDE of Visual Studio 2005 (and later versions) contains a built-in, lightweight web server for development purposes.
PWS supports these Internet protocols: FTP, SMTP and HTTP and these web languages: . A programmer can set up virtual directories and root them on an actual file system, before deployment. The usual web languages are supported, such as PHP and Perl. It also supports basic CGI (Common Gateway Interface) conventions and a subset of Classic ASP [1]. It is possible to test database connections to a database server for a web application server with this setup, as well.
Microsoft also produced a version of Personal Web Server for the Macintosh based on its acquisition of ResNova Software in November 1996.
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