QWEBS is an acronym for 'QSS Web Server'. QWEBS is actually two programs, QWEBL - the listener and QWEBS, the server. These are Cobol programs which together implement the HTTP/1.0 standards for the HP e3000 without the need for Posix. That is why it can run on 4.0 (or earlier if needed) versions of MPE.
QWEBS has a MPE compliant implementation of CGI. You can develop CGI scripts in Cobol that do simple Accept/Display statements to get your CGI parameters and return your HTML results. You can also use command files as scripts. Of course, having a web server written in Cobol is a good way to show those 'c' programmers they aren't the only ones having fun with the Internet. And if you want really good performance you can develop your CGI as subroutines and put them in an XL. We call this 'in-process cgi', which removes one of the bottlenecks of cgi - namely the creation of an additional process for the cgi program.
You can configure QWEBS to pre-allocate server processes so you can get better feel and performance. We haven't benchmarked it, but QWEBS sure seems peppy to us! We typically pre-allocate 30 server processes when we fire up QWEBS.
I'm not into pre-announcing software, but we have some really kickin' stuff running in the QSS labs based on QWEBS. Consider an application architecture that allows you to use Cobol to build stateful web applications that can run on one or more HP 3000 systems. Stateful web transaction processing, load balancing, application management, full integration with Cobol....all in MPE (no Posix required). Sounds like a dream come true. We don't have a name for it yet, but if you have any good ideas we'd be very interested in hearing from you.