HTTP

The HyperText Transfer Procotol, or the reason you're looking at this page right now.

(todo: insert relevant RFCs, especially the WebDAV ones)

Server Software:

Windows

• HFS
• TinyWeb (awesome)

Other Systems:

• Apache
• Cherokee
• thttpd - can be compiled with PHP
• Nanoweb - PHP as its own web server
• lighttpd
• nginx

...and a cast of thousands.

• pound - HTTP reverse proxy.
• Mathopd - an HTTP/1.1 single-process server.

Tools:

• Pylot, a load testing tool with nice reporting output.
• tinyproxy - I once modified this to build a content adaptation proxy for mobile devices, back when such things were necessary. Highly recommended.
• wbox
• http_load

Resources:

• HTTP compression in Python
• RFC:2616 Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.1
• RFC:2774 An HTTP Extension Framework
• RFC:3143 Known HTTP Proxy/Caching Problems
• User-Agent Info
• robots.txt validator