Microsoft Personal Web Server (PWS) is a scaled-down

web server A web server is computer software and underlying Computer hardware, hardware that accepts requests via Hypertext Transfer Protocol, HTTP (the network protocol created to distribute web content) or its secure variant HTTPS. A user agent, co ...

software for

Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

operating systems An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...

. It has fewer features than Microsoft's Internet Information Services (IIS) and its functions have been superseded by IIS and

Visual Studio Visual Studio is an integrated development environment (IDE) developed by Microsoft. It is used to develop computer programs including web site, websites, web apps, web services and mobile apps. Visual Studio uses Microsoft software development ...

. Microsoft officially supports PWS on

Windows 95 Windows 95 is a consumer-oriented operating system developed by Microsoft and the first of its Windows 9x family of operating systems, released to manufacturing on July 14, 1995, and generally to retail on August 24, 1995. Windows 95 merged ...

- 98,

Windows 98 SE Windows 98 is a consumer-oriented operating system developed by Microsoft as part of its Windows 9x family of Microsoft Windows operating systems. It was the second operating system in the 9x line, as the successor to Windows 95. It was released ...

, and Windows NT 4.0. Prior to the release of

Windows 2000 Windows 2000 is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft, targeting the server and business markets. It is the direct successor to Windows NT 4.0, and was Software release life cycle#Release to manufacturing (RT ...

, PWS was available as a free download as well as included on the Windows distribution CDs. PWS 4 was the last version and it can be found on the Windows 98 CD and the Windows NT 4.0 Option Pack. Personal Web Server was originally created by Vermeer Technologies, the same company which created Microsoft FrontPage, before they were acquired by Microsoft. It was installed by FrontPage versions 1.1 to 98 as well. NT Workstation 4.0 shipped with Peer Web Services, which was based on IIS 2.0 and 3.0. With IIS 4.0, this was renamed Personal Web Server to be consistent with the name used in 95/98. Since Windows 2000, PWS was renamed the same IIS name used in server versions of Windows as a standard Windows component.

Windows ME Windows Me (Millennium Edition) is an operating system developed by Microsoft as part of its Windows 9x family of Microsoft Windows operating systems. It was the successor to Windows 98, and was released to manufacturing on June 19, 2000, and t ...

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

Microsoft Visual Studio Visual Studio is an integrated development environment (IDE) developed by Microsoft. It is used to develop computer programs including websites, web apps, web services and mobile apps. Visual Studio uses Microsoft software development platforms ...

2005, PWS was useful in developing

web application A web application (or web app) is application software that is created with web technologies and runs via a web browser. Web applications emerged during the late 1990s and allowed for the server to dynamically build a response to the request, ...

s on the

localhost In computer networking, localhost is a hostname that refers to the current computer used to access it. The name ''localhost'' is reserved for loopback purposes. It is used to access the network services that are running on the host via t ...

before deploying to a production web server. The IDE of Visual Studio 2005 (and later versions) now contains a built-in lightweight web server for such development purposes.

FTP The File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is a standard communication protocol used for the transfer of computer files from a server to a client on a computer network. FTP is built on a client–server model architecture using separate control and dat ...

SMTP The Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) is an Internet standard communication protocol for electronic mail transmission. Mail servers and other message transfer agents use SMTP to send and receive mail messages. User-level email clients typi ...

HTTP HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) is an application layer protocol in the Internet protocol suite model for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems. HTTP is the foundation of data communication for the World Wide Web, wher ...

and the usual web languages such as

PHP PHP is a general-purpose scripting language geared towards web development. It was originally created by Danish-Canadian programmer Rasmus Lerdorf in 1993 and released in 1995. The PHP reference implementation is now produced by the PHP Group. ...

and

Perl Perl is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. Though Perl is not officially an acronym, there are various backronyms in use, including "Practical Extraction and Reporting Language". Perl was developed ...

are supported by PWS. It also supports basic CGI (

Common Gateway Interface file:Common Gateway Interface logo.svg, The official CGI logo from the spec announcement In computing, Common Gateway Interface (CGI) is an interface specification that enables web servers to execute an external program to process HTTP or HTTPS ...

) conventions and a subset of Classic ASP. Using these technologies, web applications running on PWS are capable of performing and interpreting database queries and results. Microsoft also produced a version of Personal Web Server for the Macintosh based on code acquired in its acquisition of ResNova Software in November 1996.

References

Home servers Web server software Personal Web Server {{network-software-stub