The Internet and World Wide Web

CSE 190 M (Web Programming), Spring 2008

University of Washington

Reading: Ch. 0: Introduction

Except where otherwise noted, the contents of this presentation are © Copyright 2008 Marty Stepp and Jessica Miller and are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License.

The Internet

• Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet
• a connection of computer networks using the Internet Protocol (IP)
• What's the difference between the Internet and the World Wide Web (WWW)?

Brief history

• began as a US Department of Defense network called ARPANET (1960s-70s)
• initial services: electronic mail, file transfer
• opened to commercial interests in late 80s
• WWW created in 1989-91 by Tim Berners-Lee
• popular web browsers released: Netscape 1994, IE 1995
• Amazon.com opens in 1995; Google January 1996
• Hamster Dance web page created in 1999

Key aspects of the internet

• subnetworks can stand on their own
• computers can dynamically join and leave the network
• built on open standards; anyone can create a new internet device
• lack of centralized control (mostly)
• everyone can use it with simple, commonly available software

People and organizations

• Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF): internet protocol standards
• Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN):
  decides top-level domain names
• World Wide Web Consortium (W3C): web standards

Web Servers and Browsers

• web server: a computer running web server software that listens for web page requests on TCP port 80
• popular web server software:
  • Apache: www.apache.org
  • Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) (part of Windows)
• popular web browser software (fetches/displays documents from web servers):
  • Mozilla Firefox: getfirefox.com
  • Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE): part of Windows
  • Apple Safari: part of Mac OS X
  • Opera: opera.com

Layered architecture

The internet uses a layered hardware/software architecture (also called the "OSI model"):

• physical layer : devices such as ethernet, coaxial cables, fiber-optic lines, modems
• data link layer : basic hardware protocols (ethernet, wifi, DSL PPP)
• network / internet layer : basic software protocol (IP)
• transport layer : adds reliability to network layer (TCP, UDP)
• application layer : implements specific communication for each kind of program (HTTP, POP3/IMAP, SSH, FTP)

Internet Protocol (IP)

• a simple protocol for attempting to send data between two computers
• each device has a 32-bit IP address written as four 8-bit numbers (0-255)
  e.g. 145.10.34.3
  
• find out your internet IP address: whatismyip.com
• find out your local IP address:
  in a terminal, type: ipconfig (Windows) or ifconfig (Mac/Linux)

Transmission Control Protocol (TCP)

• adds multiplexing, guaranteed message delivery on top of IP
• multiplexing: multiple programs using the same IP address
  • port: a number given to each program or service
  • port 80: web browser
  • port 25: email
  • port 22: ssh
  • port 5190: AOL Instant Messenger
  • more common ports
• some programs (games, streaming media programs) use simpler UDP protocol instead of TCP

Domain Name System (DNS)

• a set of servers that map written names to IP addresses
  • Example: www.cs.washington.edu → 128.208.3.88
• many systems maintain a local cache called a hosts file
  • Windows: C:\Windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts
  • Mac: /private/etc/hosts
  • Linux: /etc/hosts

Uniform Resource Locator (URL)

• an identifier for the location of a document on a web site
• a basic URL:

  http://www.aw-bc.com/info/regesstepp/index.html
  ~~~~   ~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
  protocol    host                path
  

• upon entering this URL into the browser, it would:
  • ask the DNS server for the IP address of www.aw-bc.com
  • connect to that IP address at port 80
  • ask the server to GET /info/regesstepp/index.html
  • display the resulting page on the screen

More advanced URLs

• anchor: jumps to a given section of a web page

  http://www.textpad.com/download/index.html#downloads
  

  • the above URL fetches index.html and then jumps downward to a part of the page labeled downloads
• port: for web servers on ports other than the default 80

  http://www.cs.washington.edu:8080/secret/money.txt
  

• query string: a set of parameters passed to a web program

  http://www.google.com/search?q=miserable+failure&start=10
  

  • the above URL asks the server at www.google.com to run the program named search and pass it two parameters:
    • q (set to "miserable+failure")
    • start (set to 10)

Hypertext Transport Protocol (HTTP)

• the set of commands understood by a web server and sent from a browser
• some HTTP commands (your browser sends these internally):
  • GET filename : download
  • POST filename : send a web form response
  • PUT filename : upload
• simulating a browser with a terminal window:

  $ telnet www.cs.washington.edu 80
  Trying 128.208.3.88...
  Connected to 128.208.3.88 (128.208.3.88).
  Escape character is '^]'.
  GET /index.html
  <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 ...">
  <html>
  ...
  

HTTP error codes

• the web server returns a special "error code" number to the browser, possibly followed by an HTML document
• common error codes:

  Number	Meaning
  200	OK
  301-303	page has moved (permanently or temporarily)
  403	you are forbidden to access this page
  404	page not found
  500	internal server error

• complete list of error codes

Web programming technologies

• Hypertext Markup Language (HTML): used for writing web pages
  • XHTML: A newer, more rigidly standardized specification of HTML
• Cascading Style Sheets (CSS): supplies stylistic info to web pages
• JavaScript: allows interactive and programmable web pages
• eXtensible Markup Language (XML): metalanguage for organizing data
• Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (Ajax): allows fetching of web data in the background for enhanced interactive web apps
• PHP Hypertext Processor (PHP): allows web server to create pages dynamically
• Structured Query Language (SQL): interaction with databases