I had a hard time painting the picture of what a server really
is. It's so simple it's confusing. A Server, low and behold, is
a computer. Your desktop PC or laptop can function as a server -
what does that mean "function as a server". It means that your
computer of choice is connected to a network (for example, the
internet) and that a program is run on that computer that
listens for incoming connections (like a java application you've
built). That's it. It doesn't even have to be connected to a
network, you can run a server locally and have programs on the
same computer talk to each other. ( Which is where 99% of the
debugging occurs during development. ). So what are
"webservers"? What does a server that hosts a website look
like?? Simple. It's a computer that listens for incoming data,
just like ALL servers. What makes it "different" from other
servers is how it interprets the data it is being sent and how
it responds. Ie, the protocol. You might have heard of HTTP
before. It stands for Hypertext Transfer