In this paper, we present the (1 + 1)-dimensional inhomogeneous nonlinear Schrodinger (NLS) equation, which describes propagation of optical waves in nonlinear optical systems exhibiting spatial inhomogeneity, inhomogeneous nonlinearity and gain or loss at the same time. Exact multi-soliton solutions are presented by the simple Darboux transformation based on the Lax Pair, and the exact one- and two-soliton solutions in explicit forms are also generated. As two examples, we consider two nonlinear optical systems. In the systems, based on the exact solutions, a series of interesting properties of optical waves are displayed.