1.
1 A Brief Intro to the Internet
- Origins
- ARPAnet - late 1960s and early 1970s
- Network reliability
- For ARPA-funded research organizations
- BITnet, CSnet - late 1970s & early 1980s
- email and file transfer for other institutions
- NSFnet - 1986
- Originally for non-DOD funded places
- Initially connected five supercomputer centers
- By 1990, it had replaced ARPAnet for nonmilitary uses
- Soon became the network for all (by the early
1990s)
- NSFnet eventually became known as the Internet
- What the Internet is:
- A world-wide network of computer networks
- At the lowest level, since 1982, all connections
use TCP/IP
- TCP/IP hides the differences among devices
connected to the Internet
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1.1 A Brief Intro to the Internet (continued)
- Internet Protocol (IP) Addresses
- Every node has a unique numeric address
- Form: 32-bit binary number
- New standard, IPv6, has 128 bits (1998)
- Organizations are assigned groups of IPs for
their computers
- Domain names
- Form: host-name.domain-names
- First domain is the smallest; last is the largest
- Last domain specifies the type of organization
- Fully qualified domain name - the host name
and all of the domain names
- DNS servers - convert fully qualified domain
names to IPs
- Problem: By the mid-1980s, several different
protocols had been invented and were being used
on the Internet, all with different user interfaces
(Telnet, FTP, Usenet, mailto)
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1.2 The World-Wide Web
- A possible solution to the proliferation of different
protocols being used on the Internet
- Origins
- Tim Berners-Lee at CERN proposed the Web
in 1989
- Purpose: to allow scientists to have access
to many databases of scientific work through
their own computers
- Document form: hypertext
- Pages? Documents? Resources?
- Well call them documents
- Hypermedia more than just text images,
sound, etc.
- Web or Internet?
- The Web uses one of the protocols, http, that
runs on the Internet--there are several others
(telnet, mailto, etc.)
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1.3 Web Browsers
- Mosaic - NCSA (Univ. of Illinois), in early 1993
- First to use a GUI, led to explosion of Web use
- Initially for X-Windows, under UNIX, but was
ported to other platforms by late 1993
- Browsers are clients - always initiate, servers
react (although sometimes servers require
responses)
- Most requests are for existing documents, using
HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP)
- But some requests are for program execution,
with the output being returned as a document
1.4 Web Servers
- Provide responses to browser requests, either
existing documents or dynamically built
documents
- Browser-server connection is now maintained
through more than one request-response cycle
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1.4 Web Servers (continued)
- All communications between browsers and
servers use Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP)
- Web servers run as background processes in the
operating system
- Monitor a communications port on the host,
accepting HTTP messages when they appear
- All current Web servers came from either
1. The original from CERN
2. The second one, from NCSA
- Web servers have two main directories:
1. Document root (servable documents)
2. Server root (server system software)
- Document root is accessed indirectly by clients
- Its actual location is set by the server
configuration file
- Requests are mapped to the actual location
- Virtual document trees
- Virtual hosts
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1.4 Web Servers (continued)
- Proxy servers
- Web servers now support other Internet protocols
- Apache (open source, fast, reliable)
- Began as the NCSA server, httpd
- Maintained by editing its configuration file
- IIS
- Maintained through a program with a GUI
interface
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1.5 Uniform Resource Locators
- General form:
scheme:object-address
- The scheme is often a communications protocol,
such as telnet or ftp
- For the http protocol, the object-address is:
fully qualified domain name/doc path
- For the file protocol, only the doc path is needed
- Host name may include a port number, as in
zeppo:80 (80 is the default, so this is silly)
- URLs cannot include spaces or any of a collection
of other special characters (semicolons, colons, ...)
- The doc path may be abbreviated as a partial path
- The rest is furnished by the server configuration
- If the doc path ends with a slash, it means it is a
directory
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1.6 Multipurpose Internet Mail
Extensions (MIME)
- Originally developed for email
- Used to specify to the browser the form of a file
returned by the server (attached by the server to
the beginning of the document)
- Type specifications
- Form:
type/subtype
- Examples: text/plain, text/html, image/gif,
image/jpeg
- Server gets type from the requested file names
suffix (.html implies text/html)
- Browser gets the type explicitly from the server
- Experimental types
- Subtype begins with xe.g., video/x-msvideo
- Experimental types require the server to send
a helper application or plug-in so the browser
can deal with the file
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1.7 The HyperText Transfer Protocol
- The protocol used by ALL Web communications
- Request Phase
- Form:
HTTP method domain part of URL HTTP ver.
Header fields
blank line
Message body
- An example of the first line of a request:
GET
/cs.uccp.edu/degrees.html
HTTP/1.1
- Most commonly used methods:
GET - Fetch a document
POST - Execute the document, using the data in
body
HEAD - Fetch just the header of the document
PUT - Store a new document on the server
DELETE - Remove a document from the server
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1.7 The HyperText Transfer Protocol
(continued)
- Four categories of header fields:
General, request, response, and entity
- Common request fields:
Accept: text/plain
Accept: text/*
If-Modified_since: date
- Common response fields:
Content-length: 488
Content-type: text/html
-Can communicate with HTTP without a browser
> telnet blanca.uccs.edu http
GET /user1 /respond.html HTTP/1.1
Host: blanca.uccs.edu
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1.7 The HyperText Transfer Protocol
(continued)
- Response Phase
- Form:
Status line
Response header fields
blank line
Response body
- Status line format:
HTTP version status code explanation
- Example: HTTP/1.1
200
OK
(Current version is 1.1)
- Status code is a three-digit number; first digit
specifies the general status
1 => Informational
2 => Success
3 => Redirection
4 => Client error
5 => Server error
- The header field, Content-type, is required
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1.7 The HyperText Transfer Protocol
(continued)
- An example of a complete response header:
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Sat, 25 July 2009 20:15:11 GMT
Server: Apache /2.2.3 (CentOS)
Last-modified: Tues, 18 May 2004 16:38:38 GMT
Etag: "1b48098-16a-3dab592dc9f80"
Accept-ranges: bytes
Content-length: 364
Connection: close
Content-type: text/html, charset=UTF-8
- Both request headers and response headers must
be followed by a blank line
1.8 Security
- There are many kinds of security problems with
the Internet and the Web
- One fundamental problem is getting data
between a browser and a server without it being
intercepted or corrupted in the process
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1.8 Security
- Security issues for a communication between a
browser and a server:
1. Privacy
2. Integrity
3. Authentication
4. Nonrepudiation
- The basic tool to support privacy and integrity
is encryption
- Originally, a single key was used for both
encryption and decryption, which requires the
sender of an encrypted document to somehow
transmit the key to the receiver
- Solution: (1976, Diffie and Hellman)
- Public-key encryption
- Use a public/private key pair
- Everyone uses your public key to
encrypt messages sent to you
- You decrypt them with your matching
private key
- It works because it is virtually
impossible to compute the private key
from a given public key
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1.8 Security
- RSA is the most widely used public-key
algorithm
- Another security problem: destruction of data on
computers connected to the Internet
- Viruses and worms
- Yet another common security problem:
Denial-of-Service (DoS)
- Created by flooding a Web server with
requests
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1.9 The Web Programmers Toolbox
- HTML
- To describe the general form and layout of
documents
- An HTML document is a mix of content and
controls
- Controls are tags and their attributes
- Tags often delimit content and specify
something about how the content should be
arranged in the document
- Attributes provide additional information
about the content of a tag
- Tools for creating HTML documents
- HTML editors - make document creation easier
- Shortcuts to typing tag names, spell-checker,
- WYSIWYG HTML editors
- Need not know HTML to create HTML
documents
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1.9 The Web Programmers Toolbox
(continued)
- Plug ins
- Integrated into tools like word processors,
effectively converting them to WYSIWYG
HTML editors
- Filters
- Convert documents in other formats to HTML
- Advantages of both filters and plug-ins:
- Existing documents produced with other tools
can be converted to HTML documents
- Use a tool you already know to produce HTML
- Disadvantages of both filters and plug-ins:
- HTML output of both is not perfect - must be
fine tuned
- HTML may be non-standard
- You have two versions of the document, which
are difficult to synchronize
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1.9 The Web Programmers Toolbox
(continued)
- XML
- A meta-markup language
- Used to create a new markup language for a
particular purpose or area
- Because the tags are designed for a specific
area, they can be meaningful
- No presentation details
- A simple and universal way of representing and
transmitting data of any textual kind
- JavaScript
- A client-side HTML-embedded scripting
language
- Only related to Java through syntax
- Dynamically typed and not object-oriented
- Provides a way to access elements of HTML
documents and dynamically change them
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1.9 The Web Programmers Toolbox
(continued)
- Flash
- A system for building and displaying text,
graphics, sound, interactivity, and animation
(movies)
- Two parts:
1. Authoring environment
2. Player
- Supports both motion and shape animation
- Interactivity is supported with ActionScript
- PHP
- A server-side scripting language
- Similar to JavaScript
- Great for form processing and database access
through the Web
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1.9 The Web Programmers Toolbox
(continued)
- Ajax
- Asynchronous JavaScript + XML
- No new technologies or languages
- Much faster for Web applications that have
extensive user/server interactions
- Uses asynchronous requests to the server
- Requests and receives small parts of
documents, resulting in much faster responses
- Java Web Software
- Servlets server-side Java classes
- JavaServer Pages (JSP) a Java-based approach
to server-side scripting
- An alternative to servlets
- JavaServer Faces adds an event-driven interface
model on JSP
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1.9 The Web Programmers Toolbox
(continued)
- ASP.NET
- Does what JSP and JSF do, but in the .NET
environment
- Allows.NET languages to be used as
server-side scripting language
- ASP.NET documents are compiled into classes
- Ruby
- A pure object-oriented interpreted scripting
language
- Every data value is an object, and all operations
are via method calls
- Most operators can be redefined by the user
- Both classes and objects are dynamic
- Variables are all type-less references to objects
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1.9 The Web Programmers Toolbox
(continued)
- Rails
- A development framework for Web-based
applications
- Particularly useful for Web applications that
access databases
- Written in Ruby and uses Ruby as its primary
user language
- Based on the Model-View-Controller
architecture
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