Introduction

Introduction
 The Internet – it is a huge network of computer networks
 An infrastructure (connectivity among a large number of
machines world wide)
 a connection of computer networks using the Internet Protocol
(IP)
Internetworking
 When two or more separate networks are connected for
exchanging data or resource, they become
Internetworking

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 What's the difference between the Internet and the World
Wide Web (WWW)?
 the Web is the collection of web sites and pages around
the world; the Internet is larger and also includes other
services such as email, chat, online games, etc.

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 Several applications:
 E-mail
 www
 File transfer (FTP)
 Remote login
 E-commerce
 Instant messaging (chat)
 Mailing lists
 …

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Introduction (cont’d)
 www (world wide web)
 A collection of websites
 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

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 A website
 A collection of resources:
 Web pages (static / dynamic)
 Media files (images, animations, sound, …)
 Style files (CSS)
 Documents (pdf, doc, txt, rtf, …)
 …
 Has a globally unique name
 E.g. www.aau.edu.et
 Stored on machines called web servers

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 Web servers are computers which offer information to
the reader. They store web pages and transmit to the
client.
 Web server Software:
 responds to client request for information
 Accept data from the client.

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Introduction (cont’d)
 A web page
 A document with a mark-up language called HTML
 The basic unit of information storage on the www

Web document can be categorized into 3 types:

i) Static
ii) Dynamic
iii) Active
Static document
Fixed content document and stored on a server
The client can get only one copy of that document
The HTML is used to create static document

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Dynamic Documents
 Don’t exist in predefined format
 Created by a web server
 When a browser request arrives, the web server runs an application
that creates the dynamic content.
 The server software returns the output of the program as a response to
the browser
 A fresh document is created for each request
 The content of dynamic document can vary from one document to
another.
 Eg: CGI common gateway interface
 Is a technology that creates and handles dynamic documents

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 Php, asp, ISP, CSS
 Active Document
 For many applications, we need a program to be run at the
client side. These are called active documents.
 Eg. We want to create a program that creates animated graphics
on screen or interact with the user
 When a browser requests the document, the server sends a copy
of the document in the form of bytecode
 The document runs at the client side.
 An active doc is transported from server to client in the form of
binary. It means it can be compressed at the server side and
decompressed at the client side

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 How does the www work
 Websites (with unique names) are stored on web servers
 Users access these websites via the Internet using software
called a web browser.
 A user sends requests for resources from a server with the help
of the a user agent (browser)
 The server sends the requested resource to the user agent
 The user agent renders the resource for the user to view.

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 WWeb browser Web sWeb server

Internet

 Eg; http://www.yahoo.com/index.html
 The browser requests the DNS for the IP address
corresponding to www.yahoo.com
 The DNS replies with the IP address
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 The browser makes TCP connection with the server
computer
 The client makes explicit request for the web page
(index.html at yahoo.com) at the server using http request
 The http request is series of lines , which among contents
two important statements are:
Get /index.html
Host: yahoo.com
 It indicates that index.html needs to be retrieved and for
the file index.html, the domain name is yahoo.com

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 The request is handed over the http software running on the
client machine transmitted to the server
 The http software on the client now hands over the http
request to TCP/IP software running on the client
 The TCP/IP software on the client breaks the http request
into packets and sends them to the TCP/IP of the web server
 The TCP/IP running on the web server reassembles the http
request using the packets and gives to the http software
running on the web server.
 The OS on the server locates the index.html and gives the
http software on the server.

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 The http software running on the web server adds some
headers to form an http response
 The http on the web server now hands over the http
response to the TCP/IP response to the web server
 The TCP/IP software running on the web server breaks
the http response into packets and sends it over the TCP
connection to the client
 The TCP/IP software on the client computer checks the
packet for correctness and reassembles them to for the
original message into html form

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Introduction (cont’d)
 Software involved:
 At the server:
 Web server software : listens for incoming requests for resources from
clients and serves the requests
 Apache - open source
 IIS (Internet Information Services) – Microsoft
 Squid
 …
 At the client:
 Web browser : sends/receives requests/responses to/from web servers on
behalf of the client and renders content as necessary
 Microsoft Internet Explorer
 Mozilla
 Firefox
 Googke Crome
 Opera
 Safari
 …

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Introduction (cont’d)
 Communication protocol
 HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol)
 Client (web browser) and Server (web server) communicate via the
HTTP to exchange request/response messages

 The web is governed by the w3c (world wide web

consortium) (www.w3.org)

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Introduction (cont’d)
 How are websites uniquely named?
 DNS (Domain Name System)
 set of servers that map written names to IP addresses
 Resolves a human friendly name (eg www.google.com) to a machine
friendly IP address (eg 64.233.187.99)
 “Phone book” of the Internet
 For this purpose, DNS servers store a table containing name-IP (among
other things) pairs and do a look-up when requested
 A DNS server may communicate with other server to resolve a given name
 many systems maintain a local cache called a hosts file
 Windows: C:\Windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts
 Mac: /private/etc/hosts
 Linux: /etc/hosts
 There are about 12 root DNS servers (http://www.root-servers.org/)

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Introduction (cont’d)
 DNS name structure
 Hierarchical in nature (eg. cs.aau.edu.et)
 cs is under aau (a subdomain of aau), aau is under edu, edu is under et.
 The highest level is the last component of the DNS address
 Labels separated by . (dot)
 Labels can be up to 63 characters long and are case insensitive
 A maximum of 255 characters is allowed in total

 The last (highest) labels of a DNS name can be:

 Three letter code top level domains (TLDs): indicating the type of
organization
 com, edu, gov, net, org, biz, …
 Two letter country codes (CCTLDs): indicating the country
 et, us, za, uk, tv, …

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Introduction (cont’d)
 URL (Uniform Resource Locator)
 The exact address of a resource on the web
 an identifier for the location of a document on a web site
 Format:
 <protocol>://<host>[:<port>][<path>][?<query>]
 E.g. http://www.somedomain.com/search.php?q=dns&lang=en

 Protocol – identifies the type of protocol to be used for communication

 http, ftp, mailto, …
 Host – identifies the machine on which the requested resource is stored
 It the computer where info. Is located.
 It is registered with domain name and associted IP adress
 Domain names (eg. www.google.com)
 IP address
 Port – identifies the port number of the web server software on the web server machine
 Default port for http: 80
 Path – identifies the name and path of the resource on the server
 The path name of the file where info is located
 Query – specifies parameters, if any, that should be sent to the server along with the request
 has the form: ?var_name1=value1&var_name2=value2&…

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 Eg: http://www.aw-bc.com/info/regesstepp/index.html
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

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 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

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HTTP
HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP)

 A protocol that enables communication b/n browser and

web server
 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

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 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>

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 A stateless protocol
 http does not remember anything about the previous request.
 It does not maintain any information about the state.
 Each request a browser sends to a web server is independent of
any other request
 Stateless means there is no record of previous interactions
and each interaction request has to be handled based
entirely on information that comes with it
 HTTP conversation involves the exchange of HTTP
messages.

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HTTP Message
 Is either a request from client to server or
 A response from server to client

 Messages are composed of:

 A start line
 One or more header fields
 An empty line – indicating the end of the header fields
 A message body (optional)

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HTTP Message - Example
HTTP/1.1 200 ok
Server: Microsoft-IIS/5.0
Date: Mon, 12 Aug 2014 08:05:30 GMT
Content-Type: text/html
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Last-Modified: Tue, 13 Aug 2007 09:34:22 GMT
Content-Length: 240

<html><head><title>page titiel</title></head>
<body>some content</body></html>

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Message Body
 Used to carry an entity body
 May be divided into chunks and sent
 Optional, i.e. messages are not required to have a message
body
 Some messages cannot even have a message body

 Example of message body:

 A web page

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HTTP Header
 Contains header fields
 The header fields can be:
 General headers
 Request headers
 Response headers
 Entity headers
 All header fields follow the same generic format
 Each header field consists of a name followed by and
colon (:) and a value:
 Header-name:value
 The order of the header field is insignificant
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General HTTP Header
 Used to specify properties of the transfer process

 Examples:
 Connection:close – client wants to close the connection when
the first response is complete
 Cache-control – client can specify additional properties if the
requested resource is cached (e.x. age)
 Date
 Transfer-Encoding
 …

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Entity Headers
 Give meta-information about the entity body (message body)
being transferred
 Apply only if a message body exists

 Examples:
 Content-Encoding – indicates type of content encodings applied (e.x.
zipped)
 Content-Language – language of the intended audience
 Content-Length – size of the entity body (message body)
 Expires
 …

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Request Headers
 Add additional information about the request
 May include information about the client/sender,
including client capability

 Examples:
 Accept - acceptable media types for response
 Accept-Charset – acceptable character set
 User-Agent – client browser
 …

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Response Headers
 More information, in addition to the status line
 May contain information about the server or resource

 Examples:
 Age – estimate of time since response was generated
 Location – used to redirect to a different location (URI)
 Proxy-Authenticate – proxy authentication challenge
 Server – information about the web server software
 …

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HTTP Request
 The request line contains three parts:
 Request method
 Request URI
 HTTP Version

 Request method
 GET: for requesting a web server sending a particular page
 POST (information) back to the server
 It is used to update an existing file with additional data
 It is used to send other data to the web server
 HEAD – like GET but only returns meta-information
 eg: if the browser wants to know the last modified data of a web page
it would use the head command.

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  PUT: it is the opposite of get command. It sends a file to the
server for storing it there.
 DELETE (information) from the server
 This command allows a browser to send an http request for
deleting a particular web page

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HTTP Request (cont’d)

 HTTP Version
 Used by the sender to notify the receiver of its abilities
 Included in the first line of the message
 Format: HTTP/<major>.<minor>
 E.x. HTTP/1.1

 Request URI
 The URI of the resource requested

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HTTP Response
 The response line contains:
 HTTP version
 Status code
 Status code description

E.x. HTTP/1.1 200 ok

 Status code
 Has 5 categories

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HTTP Response (cont’d)

 1xx – request received, processing continues

 E.x.
 100 Continue – tells client to continue with a request
 2xx – success, action was successfully received, understood
and accepted
 E.x.
 200 Ok – request has succeeded
 202 Accepted – request accepted but not processed
 3xx – further action must be taken to complete the request
 E.x.
 302 Found – resource found but temporarily moved

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HTTP Response (cont’d)
 4xx – client error or invalid request
 E.x.
 400 Bad Request – couldn’t understand request
 401 Unauthorized – request requires authorization
 403 Forbidden – client may not have access to the resource

 5xx – server error occurred

 E.x.
 500 Internal Server Error – server encountered an unexpected error
(error/bug with a server side script)
 505 HTTP Version Not Supported – server doesn’t support the HTTP
version

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 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- .exe
stream
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 Web languages / technologies
 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

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