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4.2 Running X3DOM Applications with a full scale Web Server


Usually, you will be serving your X3DOM applications with a full scale web server. This page gives some hints on the most common web servers, being Apache and IIS.
For detailed guidance on their configuration please refer to the respective official resources. Both web servers use port 80 by default.

Apache / XAMPP

Apache ist the most used web server on the Internet. It is open-source and can be downloaded from httpd.apache.org. The most recent version is 2.4, but 2.2 is still supported as well.
If your application needs a full stack of web server components we recommend XAMPP, which incorporates the latest releases of Apache, MySQL, PHP and Perl with little or no configuration of the various components being required.

Microsoft IIS

The Internet Information Services (IIS, previously Internet Information Server) is integrated in any of the latest versions of Microsoft's Windows. However, especially for non-server operating systems, the number of simultaneous connections might be limited.

BinaryGeometry issues

Some IIS setups (starting from IIS7) prevent the serving of files from (sub-)folders named or containing /bin/ in their path. This is a result of the <requestFiltering>-section in the applicationHost.config-file, typically looking like this:

                <hiddenSegments applyToWebDAV="true" \>
                    <add segment="web.config" />
                    <add segment="bin" />
                    <add segment="App_code" />
                    <add segment="App_GlobalResources" />
                    <add segment="App_LocalResources" />
                    <add segment="App_WebReferences" />
                    <add segment="App_Data" />
                    <add segment="App_Browsers" />
                <hiddenSegments />
            

This might result in a problem when using X3DOM's BinaryGeometry as the tutorial suggests to export the binary files to a folder named binGeo. Furthermore, IIS does not deal well with some deprecated BinaryGeometry's file endings which contain non-alphanumeric characters (e.g., .bin+8).