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 non-
military uses
- Soon became the network for all (by the early
1990s)

- NSFnet eventually became known as the Internet

- What the Internet is:

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
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?

- We’ll call them documents

- Hypermedia – more than just text – images,

sound, etc.

- Web or Internet?
- The Web uses one of the protocols, http, that
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
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
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
1.5 URLs
- 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
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 name’s

suffix (.html implies text/html)

- Browser gets the type explicitly from the server

- Experimental types

- Subtype begins with x-

e.g., video/x-msvideo
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
1.7 The HyperText Transfer Protocol
(continued)

- Four categories of header fields:

General, request, response, & 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

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
1.7 The HyperText Transfer Protocol
(continued)

- An example of a complete response header:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Tues, 18 May 2004 16:45:13 GMT
Server: Apache (Red-Hat/Linux)
Last-modified: Tues, 18 May 2004 16:38:38 GMT
Etag: "841fb-4b-3d1a0179"
Accept-ranges: bytes
Content-length: 364
Connection: close
Content-type: text/html, charset=ISO-8859-1

- 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
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

- If the sender and the receiver both use the

same encryption key, the key must be
transmitted from the sender 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
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
1.9 The Web Programmer’s Toolbox
- XHTML

- To describe the general form and layout of

documents

- An XHTML 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 XHTML documents

- XHTML editors - make document creation easier

- Shortcuts to typing tag names, spell-checker,
1.9 The Web Programmer’s Toolbox
(continued)

- Plug ins

- Integrated into tools like word processors,

effectively converting them to WYSIWYG
XHTML editors

- Filters

- Convert documents in other formats to XHTML

- Advantages of both filters and plug-ins:

- Existing documents produced with other tools

can be converted to XHTML documents

- Use a tool you already know to produce XHTML

- Disadvantages of both filters and plug-ins:

- XHTML output of both is not perfect - must be

fine tuned
1.9 The Web Programmer’s 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 data

of any textual kind

- JavaScript

- A client-side XHTML-embedded scripting

language

- Only related to Java through syntax

1.9 The Web Programmer’s Toolbox
(continued)

- Java

- General purpose object-oriented programming

language

- Based on C++, but simpler and safer

- Our focus is on applets, servlets, and JSP

- Perl

- Provides server-side computation for

HTML documents, through CGI

- Perl is good for CGI programming because:

- Direct access to operating systems functions

- Powerful character string pattern-matching

operations
1.9 The Web Programmer’s Toolbox
(continued)

- PHP

- A server-side scripting language

- An alternative to CGI

- Similar to JavaScript

- Great for form processing and database access

through the Web

- 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

1.9 The Web Programmer’s Toolbox
(continued)

- Rails

- A development framework for Web-based

applications

- Particularly useful for applications that access

databases

- Written in Ruby and uses Ruby as its primary

user language

- Based on the Model-View-Controller

architecture

- Ajax

- Asynchronous JavaScript + XML

- No new technologies or languages

- Much faster for Web applications that have

extensive user/server interactions