Webserver, your suggestion please

Hello, I have a question, I am trying to learn about web serving & I am a little undecided about which to use.
I am setting up a Intranet at my house so I can practice web development.
I currently have XP Pro, I have Studio MX, MySQL & Active Perl, what I am after is the following: Forum, Websites, Live Chat, Database driven sites, password protected sites things like that.
In your opinion what would be the best set up? Would what I already have be enough?
Thanx

There's basically two ways you can go. IIS or Apache - these are the two main webservers used.

IIS is of course Microsoft, meaning you can run ASP scripts, and all the new .NET (C#,VB.NET, etc) stuff. Apache runs your PHP, Python... your linux flavoured stuff.

Once you've learnt HTML, form creation, etc, you are going to need to learn a server-side language, so that you can process forms, and do other funky stuff, like build webpages using content stored in a database.

Good luck - and enjoy yourself - web development is the funnest.

Excellent, thank you very much for the reply, since I have the IIS 5 & ColdFusion already I will give it a crack. I just wanted to stick with one & learn as much about it as I can
Thank you again

Just be sure and patch IIS fully with all of the security updates. It'll be a real pain if it gets hacked. Friend of mine got fried with his IIS box not too long ago, lost quite a bit of info..

A make sure you have a firewall - and it's setup properly. That is, block all traffic, then only open the ports that you need. Heard some amusing stories recently of people leaving all ports open, then only blocking the "trouble" ports.... lol

ROFL.. yea that can be a big problem too

Forum: http://www.invisionboard.com
Websites: ???
Live Chat: There is a tutorial on making one somewhere
Database driven site: Ditto
Password Protected Sites: Ditto

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