HTTP Servers

In this course, we'll be creating a dynamic website. 0:00 So, let's go over a little bit of theory of how websites operate. 0:02 Let's start with the web browser. 0:06 A web browser is an application that is used to download and 0:09 render HTML and CSS and execute any client side JavaScript. 0:12 You type in a website address into a browser's address bar and hit enter, and 0:17 it sends a request for information to a server or 0:21 a computer on the internet that has that domain name assigned to it. 0:25 Part of the information that the server receives in the request is the address or 0:30 the URL that the client has entered. 0:34 A URL will have a path to a file like index.html. 0:37 The software running on the server like Apache or 0:41 NGINX, will be configured to look for a certain directory on the server 0:44 and look for the file, and in turn reads its contents and 0:49 sends it back to the browser. 0:52 The way the browsers and the web server agree to communicate is called a Protocol. 0:55 The Protocol that the browser and 1:01 web servers use is Hypertext Transfer Protocol or HTTP. 1:03 You can refer to the software on the server as an HTTP Server and 1:07 the browser as an HTTP Client. 1:12 Now, what happens when you want a dynamic site, for 1:16 example, if I wanted a PHP script to run on my server? 1:19 The HTTP Server would need to use a PHP Interpreter to 1:23 run the code to generate dynamic content on the page and send it. 1:27 So the question is, how does Node.js fit in? 1:32 Well, with Node.js you can actually create your own HTTP server programmatically. 1:35 Handling URLs, and requests, and responding however you want. 1:41 You can serve static files or generate dynamic content. 1:46 It's all up to you. 1:50 And that's what we'll be doing in this course. 1:51 Creating an HTTP server, serving files, and 1:53 generating dynamic content all in Node.js. 1:57