Can someone explain servers to me?

Wappler General
1

Hi everyone,

I’m excited to have just discovered Wappler. I’m attempting to see if I can get a handle on the program with no coding experience. Not only that, but my knowledge on how websites function at all is limited.

So here are probably the most basic questions that have ever been asked on this forum: What are servers exactly? Why does it appear that many of Wappler’s features will not work without a server connection? And why can I not simply store the files that Wappler requires from the server locally (on my computers hard drive) while I’m building the application?

I’ve watched all of the tutorial videos and read the relevant documents provided on this topic, but unfortunately I’m missing the basic concepts so it has been difficult to understand.

Any help would be much appreciated!

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Yes, i guess that is the most basic question ever asked but we always send a warm welcome to any new users.

Keeping things as simple as possible, a web server is a computer running a special server program (server software) which hosts the web pages you have written to be accessible from a web browser (such as firefox, chrome, safari, edge etc). The server does more than just hold the pages, it is responsible for “assembling” all the constituent parts and running any code to generate the html which your web browser displays

You can think of it as the engine of the internet, without it there would be no web pages.It responds to http:// and https:// with an HTML page

However your local machine can run it’s own web server such as WAMP (windows), LAMP (linux & Mac), MAMP (Mac and Windows)

Additionally Windows Professional has the IIS web server as an optional feature which can be installed from the control panel

So it is quite common for developers to develop on a local server and then when complete deploy the final product to an internet server for access by the public

Hope that helps, tried to make it as simple as possible for you.

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Thank you! That helps a lot. So it sounds like I should be setting up a WAMP server. I’ll look into this!

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Yes, WAMP is a good option, it will install a web server, the PHP web language and a database engine (MySql) which is basically everything you should ever need.

If you are around 3pm (UK time) then you may find this weeks webinar really useful as it deals with the basics of designing a simple web app.

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A solid option to create a server locally is AMPPS. Quite flexible and complete solution.

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Thank you Marcio. Out of everything I tried AMPPS by far worked the best for me.

Some points for others as clueless as me:

  1. Watch this video before you do anything:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqA5-0JIa4o

  2. Ensure you have visual C++ installed properly

  3. Your Wappler project must be saved to the folder that the domain you create (see video) links to.

Thanks everyone!

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