Web Programming Step by Step

Chapter 1
The Internet and World Wide Web

Except where otherwise noted, the contents of this presentation are Copyright 2009 Marty Stepp and Jessica Miller.

What is the Internet?

• A "series of tubes" (explanation)

• How many internets are there, anyway? Is The Google one of them?

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 (1.1.1)

• 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 (1.1.2)

• 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

Layered architecture (1.1.3)

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)
  
• 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 443 for secure browsing)
  • 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

Web servers and browsers (1.2.1)

• web server: software that listens for web page requests
  • Apache
  • Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) (part of Windows)
• web browser: fetches/displays documents from web servers
  • Mozilla Firefox
  • Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE)
  • Apple Safari
  • Google Chrome
  • Opera

Domain Name System (DNS) (1.2.2)

• 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
  

  • fetches index.html then jumps down to 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
  

  • parameter q is set to "miserable+failure"
  • parameter start is set to 10

Hypertext Transport Protocol (HTTP) (1.2.3)

• 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

• when something goes wrong, 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

Internet media ("MIME") types

• sometimes when including resources in a page (style sheet, icon, multimedia object), we specify their type of data

  MIME type	file extension
  text/html	.html
  text/plain	.txt
  image/gif	.gif
  image/jpeg	.jpg
  video/quicktime	.mov
  application/octet-stream	.exe

• Lists of MIME types: by type, by extension

Web languages / technologies (1.2.4)

• Hypertext Markup Language (HTML): used for writing web pages
• Cascading Style Sheets (CSS): stylistic info for web pages
• PHP Hypertext Processor (PHP): dynamically create pages on a web server
• JavaScript: interactive and programmable web pages
• Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (Ajax): accessing data for web applications
• eXtensible Markup Language (XML): metalanguage for organizing data
• Structured Query Language (SQL): interaction with databases