Open Source Web Server For Embedded Systems
By David M Howard
Tuesday, August 26, 2003
In 1996 I made the first presentation ever given at the Embedded Systems Conference in San Jose, CA describing how to use a web server as the user interface for an embedded system. Since then, that concept has been widely used. As part of my presentation I provided source code for a portable C language implementation of an HTTP 1.0 web server that does not need a file system to serve pages. One important property of this implementation is that it is linked directly to the rest of your application rather than running as separate processs (which embedded systems usually don't even have). This allows direct access to the data and methods of your application, which is important for generating dynamic web pages that control of an embedded application.
This server has been ported to Linux, Win32, Vxworks, pSOS and VRTX32, and the file system update lets you serve static pages if you have a file system.