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HTTP Servers
2:01The way computers agree to talk to each other is known as a protocol. In this video we'll discuss the protocol that web browsers and web servers use and how this ties into Node.js.
In this course, we'll be creating a
dynamic website.
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So, let's go over a little bit of theory
of how websites operate.
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Let's start with the web browser.
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A web browser is an application that is
used to download and
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render HTML and CSS and execute any client
side JavaScript.
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You type in a website address into a
browser's address bar and hit enter, and
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it sends a request for information to a
server or
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a computer on the internet that has that
domain name assigned to it.
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Part of the information that the server
receives in the request is the address or
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the URL that the client has entered.
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A URL will have a path to a file like
index.html.
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The software running on the server like
Apache or
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NGINX, will be configured to look for a
certain directory on the server
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and look for the file, and in turn reads
its contents and
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sends it back to the browser.
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The way the browsers and the web server
agree to communicate is called a Protocol.
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The Protocol that the browser and
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web servers use is Hypertext Transfer
Protocol or HTTP.
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You can refer to the software on the
server as an HTTP Server and
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the browser as an HTTP Client.
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Now, what happens when you want a dynamic
site, for
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example, if I wanted a PHP script to run
on my server?
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The HTTP Server would need to use a PHP
Interpreter to
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run the code to generate dynamic content
on the page and send it.
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So the question is, how does Node.js fit
in?
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Well, with Node.js you can actually create
your own HTTP server programmatically.
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Handling URLs, and requests, and
responding however you want.
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You can serve static files or generate
dynamic content.
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It's all up to you.
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And that's what we'll be doing in this
course.
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Creating an HTTP server, serving files,
and
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generating dynamic content all in Node.js.
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