web server question

So, serving an entire HTML web page from an Arduino will fill up ram REALLY quickly.
Id like to have my web page hosted some where else and the Arduino just sends and recieves commands. I know some HTML, enough to make a web page with images, links, rollovers, etc, but I would have no idea how to make a web page that could send a request to an Arduino and get variables back, etc, to print them to the page. Can anyone point me in the right direction?

Thanks.

Or handle the pages from an SDcard?

There are many web servers out there, but Apache is probably still the best
known. http://projects.apache.org/projects/http_server.html

Thanks.

The only reason I'm hesitant to try it is because serving from an SD card can be slow, so I'm told. I dont want to miss something while busy reading and serving from the SD card.

I know some HTML, enough to make a web page with images, links, rollovers, etc, but I would have no idea how to make a web page that could send a request to an Arduino and get variables back, etc, to print them to the page. Can anyone point me in the right direction?

You would include a link to the arduino server in the web page to send the command, and then display the returned variable in an embedded frame, or use another more recent method (see tutorial below) to embed the variable in the current page.

There are two ways you could approach this: incorporating the Arduino data into the UI at the client-side or server-side.

To do it server side, your front end web site would consist of a web app (ASP, JSP, PHP etc) which executed an HTTP transaction to the Arduino in order to send commands to it or get status data from it. With this approach you have a lot of control over concurrency, security, logging etc which can all be done within your web app. This approach gives you a better solution.

To do it client side your main UI would include code to make the client (browser) make the HTTP requests directly to the Arduino. You could use any AJAX techniques you like for that, or just use embedded frames/iframes and so on. This approach gives you a simpler implementation.

Up to you to decide how you want to make the better/simpler trade-off.

Zoomkat,
I'm on page 12 and I've already stayed up later than I should have reading this awesome tutorial. Thanks!