which webserver is suitable for this design?

We start to implement a project at university to check student attendances. Each student card will be recognized by the RFID module on an Embedded Linux board. The Embedded Linux board can communicate with the a remote webserver to check the identification of the student card. The webserver is expected to have the follow开发者_StackOverflowing features:

• has a database so that we can add or remove entries for student cards.
• can authenticate the client access, so that only authorized users (or the Embedded Linux board) have privileges to manipulate the database.
• has a web interface for admin remote management.
• the Embedded Linux board can retrieve data and put new data to the database (we intend to use cURL to implement this feature).

We have never done any projects on deploying webserver before, we don't know what kind of webserver is suitable for this design. Any suggestions are appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Not sure if this is the structure you want but this is the structure generally used when an embedded linux device hosting an application needs to communicate to a server based DB:

1. On server use LAMP/WAMP and expose a set of webservices using php that provide an interface to talk to the DB. The webservice can send back data in XML or JSON or pian text as well depending on the project needs.
2. On the device side your application communicates with the server by calling appropriate webservices exposed and receives data back from it.
3. If you want remote access also, you need to develop a web application hosted on the server that also talks to the DB using the php based webservices. This way both your device and remote web application are using the same interface to talk to the DB. This can further be enhanced so that data changed from one is pushed to the other also eg data modified on device gets pushed realtime to the web application also.

I would recommend you explore Google App Engine. It's easy and free to setup and get started. If you plan on communicating with the app through something other than HTTP/SSL, then I wouldn't recommend Google App Engine.

Jetty is another light yet powerful Java web server.

Depending on your needs, you could also use the LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP).

So far, none of your constraints raise any red flags on these platforms, with the exception of the RFID module. You would need to make sure the data can get from the hardware to your application.

If I understand this correctly, your webserver is not running on the Embedded board. In which case, you do not need to have memory footprint constraints. You can use mature webservers like Apache also. But you can also take a look at micro-httpd, lighttpd and GoAhead webserver if you want to put the webserver functionality on the board itself.

If your webserver is needs to be run on the device you need embedded web servers and GoAhead is one web server is which very lightweight and free of cost. And also it runs in Linux.

We developed few applications based on GoAhead web server and its good.