Need Help - What is a 'Proxy'?

[layman]

Can someone help this newbie here?

I would like to understand what these terms mean and their purpose.
Can anyone give me a brief explanation or point me to a source of
same?

I have already searched on Google, but all I find are tips on how to
deal with them, but no explanation as to what they really are, and why
I should or should not use one. I am not on a network - just a single
computer.

PROXY
PROXY SERVER
PROXY SETTING
WEB PROXY


Thanks

 

[Jake]

http://www.webopedia.com/ that's an online encyclopaedia of all things web
rlated and stuff. type in the definitions there

 

[Guest]

A proxy server is a server that sits between an application [such as your Web
browser], and a real server on the network [or the internet]. It intercepts
all requests to the real server to see if it can fulfill the requests itself.
If not, it forwards the request to the real server.

As an example, when surfing the web; a proxy server acts as both a server
system and a client system. It is a server when accepting HTTP requests from
your browser [Internet Explorer], and acts as a client system when its
browser software connects to remote servers to retrieve documents.

The proxy server uses the header fields passed to it by the browser without
modification when it connects to the remote server. This means the browser
does not lose any functionality when going through a proxy.

A complete proxy server should be able to communicate all the Web protocols,
the most important ones being HTTP, FTP, Gopher, and WAIS. Proxies that
handle only a single Internet protocol, such as HTTP, are possible, but a Web
browser would then require access to other proxy servers to handle the
remaining protocols.

When a browser sends a request through a proxy server, the browser always
uses HTTP for the transactions with the proxy server. This is true even when
the user wants to access a remote server that uses another protocol; for
example, FTP.

Instead of specifying only the pathname and search keywords to the proxy
server, the browser specifies the full URL. This way the proxy server has all
the information necessary to make the actual request to the remote server
specified in the request URL, using the protocol specified in the URL.


For more information and graphical explanations look to:
http://vms.process.com/~help/helpproxy.html#E11E36