> For the complete documentation index, see [llms.txt](https://vera-wang.gitbook.io/notes/llms.txt). Markdown versions of documentation pages are available by appending `.md` to page URLs; this page is available as [Markdown](https://vera-wang.gitbook.io/notes/backend-infrastructure/web-servers.md).

# Web Servers

Server-side web frameworks provide a lot of "common" web server functionality that you might otherwise have to implement yourself (e.g. support for sessions, support for users and authentication, easy database access, templating libraries, etc.)

Server-side programming allows developers to make use of **sessions** — basically, a mechanism that allows a server to store information on the current user of a site and send different responses based on that information.