Web Technologies: Kevin Mcmanus

Web Technologies
Kevin McManus
Web Technologies
WWW Architecture
Platform: Windows, Mac, Unix, etc.
Client
Browser: IE, Mozilla, Opera, etc.
Request:
http://www.gre.ac.uk/about/
Network HTTP over TCP/IP
Response:
<html>…</html>
Server Platform: Windows, Mac, Unix, etc.
Web Server: Apache, IIS, Xitami, etc.
© K.Mc 2008 the University of Greenwich 2

Web Technologies
WWW Architecture
• Client-Server Request-Response architecture
• You request a web page
• e.g. http://www.gre.ac.uk/about/index.html
• HTTP request
• The web server responds with data

• HTTP response
• usually in the form of a web page (HTML document)
• could be any file format
• web page is written using HyperText Markup Language (HTML)
• Web pages are identified by a Uniform Resource Locator (URL)

• protocol: e.g. http
• web server: e.g. www.gre.ac.uk
• [machine name].[domain name]
• web page: e.g. about/index.html

Web Technologies
Internet Standards
• Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)
http://www.ietf.org/
• founded 1986
• a large open international community of network
designers, operators, vendors, and researchers
concerned with the evolution of the Internet
architecture and the smooth operation of the Internet
• open to any interested individual or organisation
• establishes standards through working groups, mailing
lists and Request For Comments (RFC) documents
http://www.ietf.org/rfc.html
Web Technologies
Web Standards
• World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
http://www.w3.org
• founded 1994 by Tim Berners-Lee
• currently hosted by MIT, ERCIM and Keio University
• open to corporate membership
• develops interoperable technologies to lead the Web
to its full potential
• produces specifications, standards, technical reports,
guidelines, software, and tools
• a forum for information, commerce, communication,
and collective understanding
• home of the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)
• access for all
Web Technologies
Internet / Web
• The Internet (capital I) is a globally
interconnected network of computers
• employs a wide variety of communication
technologies
• wires, fibres, satellites and so on
• supports a number of protocols
• The Web (capital W) is globally
interconnected network of information
• hypertext documents
• using the Internet to connect information
Web Technologies
Clients & Servers
Similarities
• Client and server computers both usually have:

• hardware
• Central Processing Unit (CPU)
• e.g. Intel Pentium, AMD Athlon, IBM PPC, Sun Sparc
• memory
• I/O
• Visual Display Unit (VDU), storage (fixed, removable), network
• bus to connect it all together
• software
• multi-tasking operating system
• Unix, Linux, NT, XP
• file system
• applications

Web Technologies
Clients & Servers
Differences
• Clients
• generally support a single user
• optimized for responsiveness to user
• have a user interface, graphics
• have client applications
• e.g. web browsers
• Servers
• supports multiple users
• optimized for throughput
• more: CPUs (SMP), memory, disks (SANs), I/O
• provide services
• e.g. web, file, print, database, e-mail, telnet, directory
• provides a high quality of service
• RAID, UPS, redundant power supplies, hot swap devices

Web Technologies
Web Browser
• Client-side application
• also known as a User Agent
• Requests resources from web servers
• knows how to parse and render HTML
• may know how to handle images
• may know how to handle client-side scripts
• may use plug-ins to handle other media formats
• Popular browsers
• have a graphical interface
• Mosaic - developed at NCSA circa 1992
• Modern browsers include: Internet Explorer, Mozilla, Netscape, Opera
• compatibility is an issue
• Uncommon browsers
• text only – Lynx
• assistive technologies – Jaws, IBM Home Page Reader

Web Technologies
Web Server
• A program running on a server
• Service HTTP requests from web clients
• accepts the request
• returns the requested resource (if it can)
• HTTP response
• usually an HTML web page
• Originally developed as the HTTP daemon (HTTPd) at NCSA
• circa 1995 following work by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN
• Configurable
• deny or grant requests
• provide virtual hosts
• Logs requests and responses
• Popular servers
• Apache (70%), Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS), Sun One

Web Technologies
Proxy Servers & Firewalls

• Proxy Server
• a server that sits between a client and the Internet
• improves performance by caching frequently accessed resources
• essential to achieve scalability of the Web
• can filter requests to prevent access to certain web sites
• used to implement censorship
• can alter the client's request or the server's response
• useful but open to abuse
• Firewall
• a piece of hardware and/or software that prevents
communications forbidden by a security policy
• controls network traffic between different zones of trust
• prevents unauthorized access to a network from the Internet

Web Technologies
Networks
• Network = an interconnected collection of
independent computers
• Why have networks?
• resource sharing, information sharing, reliability, communication
• Networked computers can offer so much more than
isolated machines
• Web technologies add:
• global information sharing: search engines, wikis
• applications that do not require a client-side installation
• new business models: e-commerce
• new education models: e-learning
• new ways of organising society: e-government, social networks
• entertainment: radio and television streaming and podcasts

Web Technologies
Networks
• Network scope
• internet: a collection of connected networks
• Internet: a specific world-wide network based on IP,
used to connect companies, universities,
governments, organizations and individuals.
• grew from ARPANET, funded by the US DoD.
• intranet: a network based on Internet technologies
that is internal to a company or organization
• extranet: a network based on Internet technologies
that connects one company or organization to another

Web Technologies
Network Protocol Stack
Application layer
HTTP HTTP
Transport layer
TCP TCP
Internet layer
IP IP
Physical layer
Ethernet Ethernet

Networks
Web Technologies
Physical Layer
• Defines the physical specifications for devices
• electrical, optical, electromagnetic, dimensional
• Establishes connections to a medium of communication
• copper wire, fibre-optic, wireless
• Ethernet is now the most common implementation
• (actually the data link layer in the OSI model)
• many variations on ethernet
• the local router maps IP addresses to Media Access Control
(MAC) addresses
• 48bit address of an ethernet controller
• must be unique on a subnet
• usually permanently set at point of manufacture

Networks
Web Technologies
Internet Layer
• Internet Protocol (IP)
• Responsible for communicating packets from source to
destination
• across multiple network hops
• Not guaranteed to be reliable
• IP address: 32 bit value usually written in dotted decimal
notation as four 8-bit numbers (0 to 255) e.g. 130.51.12.4
• globally unique
• for computers connected to the Internet
• limited number of addresses – only 4 billion!
• Network Address Translation (NAT) used to increase capacity
• IPv6 provides increased number of addresses
• 128 bit addresses

Networks
Web Technologies
Transport Layer
• Provides an efficient, reliable and cost-effective service
• Uses the sockets programming model
• Port numbers are used to identify the application
• well-known ports identify standard services
e.g. HTTP uses port 80, SMTP uses port 25
• can use other port numbers – if they are free
e.g. http://fred.foo.net:8080/bar/myfile.html
• Transmission Control Protocol (TCP)
• connection-oriented byte stream
• guaranteed reliability
• User Datagram Protocol (UDP)
• connectionless
• no guarantee but lower overheads

Networks
Web Technologies
Application Layer
• Telnet - remote terminal
• File Transfer Protocol (FTP)
• Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP)
• Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP)
• Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP)
• Post Office Protocol (POP)
• Interactive Mail Access Protocol (IMAP)
• Secure Shell (SSH) – secure terminal
• Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) – the principal
protocol of the World Wide Web

Hypertext Transfer Protocol
Web Technologies
HTTP
• a.k.a. Hypertext Transport Protocol
• HTTP is a simple stateless request-response protocol
• A web client (user agent) requests a resource identified by a
uniform resource locator (URL)
• The web server identified in the URL responds with the file
identified in the URL
• the file may contain static data
• HTML pages, GIFs, JPEGs, Microsoft Word documents, Adobe PDF
documents, etc., etc.
• the file may be a program that runs on the server to output data
• ASP, PHP, Perl, JSP, etc., etc.
• HTTP/1.0 highly successful
• HTTP/1.1 introduced to address flaws in 1.0 and improve network
performance
• pipelining requests and responses

Web Technologies
HTTP Methods
• GET, POST, HEAD, PUT, DELETE, TRACE, OPTIONS, CONNECT
• GET and POST are both used to...
• request a resource from a server
• send data with the request
• as name value pairs
• GET appends name value pairs to the URL
• visible in the browser
• can be bookmarked and cached
• safe, idempotent
• POST sends name value pairs after the HTTP header
• not cached
• can carry larger payload
• Differences between GET and POST are subtle and significant
• we will look closely at this later

Web Technologies
HTTP Request
Method File name HTTP version
GET /~k.mcmanus/index.html HTTP/1.1

Host: staffweb.cms.gre.ac.uk
Connection: close
Accept: text/xml,text/html,text/plain,image/png,*/*
Accept-Language: en-gb,en
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible;MSIE 6.0;Windows NT 5.0)
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*
If-Modified-Since: Mon, 18 Sep 2006 22:57:19 GMT
Referer: http://web-sniffer.net
Blank line Headers
Data – none for GET

Web Technologies
HTTP Response
HTTP version Status code Reason phrase
Headers
HTTP/1.0 200 OK
Date: Thu, 21 Sep 2006 22:06:05 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.33 (Unix) PHP/4.3.10
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html
ETag: "5d150-141c-450f244f"
Last-Modified: Mon, 18 Sep 2006 22:57:19 GMT
Content-Length: 5184
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict Data
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
...
</html>
Web Technologies
HTTP Server Status Codes

Code Description
200 OK
201 Created
301 Moved Permanently
302 Moved Temporarily
400 Bad Request – not understood
401 Unauthorized
403 Forbidden – not authorized
404 Not Found
500 Internal Server Error

Web Technologies
HTTP
• HTTP is a stateless protocol
• Each HTTP request is independent of previous and subsequent
requests
• HTTP/1.0 defaults to Connection: close
• closes the channel of communication immediately after a response
• Connection: keep-alive was introduced to enable persistent
connections
• no need to re-negotiate a connection for each request
• a connection can be re-used for multiple requests
• HTTP/1.1 defaults to keep-alive for efficiency
• supports pipelining to allow multiple requests to be sent in one TCP packet
• The stateless nature of HTTP has a big impact on how web

applications are designed
• we will look very closely at this

Web Technologies
State Preservation
• State preservation mechanisms come in three
basic variations:
• cookies
• store a small amount of information on the client
• sent to the server at each HTTP request
• session variables
• a unique identifier is used to associate information stored on
the server with a particular client
• passing data at each request-response cycle
• store information in the web page
• appending data to a URL
• hidden fields in HTML forms
Web Technologies
HTTPS
• A secure version of HTTP
• syntactically identical to HTTP
• Allows client and server to exchange data with
confidence that the data was neither modified nor
intercepted during transmission
• essential when communicating sensitive information over the
Web
• Implements HTTP over Secure Sockets Layer (SSL)
• SSL is also known as Transport Layer Security protocol (TLS)
• uses public key encryption to encode data during transmission

Web Technologies
URIs, URLs and URNs

• Uniform Resource Identifier (URI = URL or URN)
• generic term for all resource names and addresses
• Uniform Resource Locator (URL)

• a set of URI schemes that have explicit instructions on how to
access a resource over the Internet
• globally unique
http://w3.foo.net:8080/bar/index.php?fruit=plum&user=joe
[protocol]://[host]:[port]/[file path]?[arg]=[val]&[arg]=[val]
• Uniform Resource Name (URN)

• a URI that has an institutional commitment to availability and
persistence
• http://www.w3.org/Addressing
• http://www.w3.org/Addressing/URL/5_BNF.html
Web Technologies
Multipurpose Internet Mail

Extensions MIME
• Originally designed for email, also used for HTTP
• Tells the browser how to interpret the incoming data
• Defines types of data/documents
• ASCII - text/plain, text/html, text/xml
• image formats - image/gif, image/jpeg
• audio formats - audio/x-aiff, audio/mpeg3
• binary data - application/octet-stream
• Applied by the web server according to the filename
extension
e.g. a file called daisy.png will be sent with a mime type image/png

Web Technologies
Domain Name System DNS

• Human-friendly domain names,
gre.ac.uk
• Globally unique identification of computers
bukowski.gre.ac.uk
• Hierarchical name space with limited root names
• organisational: .com .net .gov .edu .org .mil
• national: .uk .jp .de .fr .tv etc.
• Internet Corporation For Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN)
assumes responsibility for global coordination of the namespace
• ICANN assigns control of each namespace to a registration authority
• e.g. VeriSign for .com, Nominet for .uk
• the Joint Academic Network (JANET) acts as authority for .ac.uk
• JANET devolves authority for .gre.ac.uk to the University of
Greenwich

Web Technologies
Domain Name System DNS

• DNS servers map domain names to IP addresses
• usually using the Berkeley Internet Name Daemon (BIND)
• actually mapping fully qualified machine names to IP addresses
• Web client contacts it’s local DNS server to translate the
domain part of a URL into an IP address
• If the local DNS server cannot resolve the address then the
request is passed to DNS at the next level of controlling authority
• resolved addresses are cached by the local DNS server
• and by the browser
• The browser can then send an HTTP request to the IP address
http://staffweb.cms.gre.ac.uk/~mk05/page1.html
Is the same as…
http://193.60.76.168/~mk05/page1.html

Web Technologies
Hypertext
• Conventional text has a single linear narrative
path
• time line
• beginning – middle - end
• Hypertext
• multiple paths
• may be read in any order
• possibly an inappropriate order
• not new a new concept
• an indexed or referenced document
• encyclopaedia, academic text
• Computers are very good at traversing indexes
• first computer hypertext system developed by IBM in 1968
• required a mainframe computer
• first popular system Apple HyperCard in 1987
HyperText Markup Language
Web Technologies
HTML
• Originally defined by Tim Berners-Lee circa 1992
• further developed by the IETF
• simplified version of the Standard Generalized Markup Language
(SGML)
• an international standard (ISO) HTML4.01 1999
• later specifications are maintained by the W3C
• Tag based markup
• tags define the structure of a page
• metadata describing how to render the page
• headings, paragraphs, lists, etc.
• tags can have attributes
• provide extra clues about page rendering
e.g. colour, font, size, decoration
• anchor tags link to other (parts of) pages
• hypertext

Web Technologies
HTML
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>page1.html</TITLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY BGCOLOR="#FFFFDD">
<H1>Simple Example HTML page</H1>
<P>
This <I>paragraph</I> contains an anchor tag<BR>
<A HREF="page2.html">click here for the next page</A>
</P>
</BODY>
</HTML>

Web Technologies
Cascading Style Sheets CSS

• Rules to control HTML web page rendering in the web browser
• provides greater styling control than HTML
• Author styles
• external style sheets
• one style sheet can be used with many web pages
• one web page can use many style sheets
• improves consistency of style across the pages of a web site
• easier updating and maintenance of the web site
• embedded styles
• rules embedded in the head of an HTML page
• inline styles
• rules as attributes in individual HTML tags
• User styles and user agent styles
• applied by the user to cater for their individual needs
• Style rules cascade
• inherited from parent tag to child tag
• from external to embedded to inline

Web Technologies
Client Side Scripting

• Executable script embedded into HTML pages
• Parsed and executed by the web client
• Usually JavaScript
• native support in most web clients
• Script may be included as:
• an external file
• embedded in the page head
• inline with the page content
• Can access and operate on page contents
• using the Document Object Model (DOM)
• Can respond to events in the browser
• e.g. onClick, onMouseOver, onKeyPress
• Used to enhance the user experience
• e.g. image rollovers, form data validation
Web Technologies
Extensible Markup Language
XML
• Simplified subset of SGML
• A meta-language - extensible
• a language for defining other languages
e.g. XHTML, MathML, SVG, RSS, RDF
• Represents hierarchical data
• tree structure
• human and machine readable format
• Useful for data exchange and transformation
• Facilitates separation of content from presentation
• Enabling technology for web services and the semantic
web

Web Technologies
Extensible Hypertext Markup Language
XHTML
• XHTML is an XML conforming HTML
• XHTML 1.0 first published in 2000
• three variants – transitional, frameset, strict
• XHTML 1.1 became a W3C recommendation in 2001
• strict and modular
• Many HTML tags and attributes are deprecated
• all styling is deprecated from strict XHTML
• Strict syntax forces separation of content from presentation
• XHTML tags describe only the page structure
• greatly simplifies page markup
• CSS is used to provide presentation
• cleaner code improves legibility, maintenance and accessibility
• recommended by WAI

Web Technologies
Multipart HTML documents

• It is usual for HTML documents to be composed
from several component parts such as
• CSS
• JavaScript
• images
• media - audio, video, Shockwave (Flash movies)
• applets – small Java applications
• Each component part has to be downloaded from
a web server
• multiple HTTP requests are required to download a
single web page
• HTTP 1.1 can pipeline these requests
• components are not necessarily from the same web server
Web Technologies
Server Side Scripting

• Application program running on the web server
• output is returned to the web browser
• usually HTML
• Can access resources on the server
• files, databases
• Common Gateway Interface (CGI)
• standard way to allow programs to run on the web server
• often Perl scripts
• may be written in any language the server supports
• output from the program (STDOUT) is routed through the web server
back to the client
• Web server scripting environments
• executable script embedded into HTML pages
e.g. Active Server Pages (ASP), PHP Hypertext Preprocessor (PHP),
Java Server Pages (JSP), Server Side Includes (SSI)

Web Services
Web Technologies
Evolution of the Web
HTML, XML
HTML HTML XML XML
Generation 1 Generation 2 Generation 3

Static HTML Web Applications Web Services

Web Technologies

• The Web was originally conceived to serve static HTML pages over
HTTP
• In a short period of time many technologies were introduced and
developed to provide dynamic, interactive web pages and stateful
web applications
• In an even shorter period of time the Web has dramatically changed
many of the ways in which we work, relax and function as
individuals and as a society
• Web technologies continue to advance to support service oriented
architectures and the semantic web
• From this soup of technologies Web2.0 has evolved

Web Technologies

asynchronous
partial page
updates
HTML, XML
user generated
content
service oriented
architectures
XML
Generation 4
Web 2.0

Web Technologies
Questions

Web Technologies
Further reading
• The World Wide Web Consortium
http://www.w3.org/
http://www.w3.org/WAI/
http://www.w3.org/Addressing/
• Wikipedia
http://www.wikipedia.org/
• Mozilla
http://www.mozilla.org
• Apache
http://www.apache.org
• Web Resources collected by Kevin McManus

http://staffweb.cms.gre.ac.uk/~k.mcmanus/web

Web Technologies
Questions
• What is the sequence of events in a web browser such
as Mozilla when you follow a link to the following URL?
http://staffweb.cms.gre.ac.uk/~k.mcmanus
• What are the advantages of using a simple stateless

protocol to implement the Web?
• Why was HTTP1.1 developed?
• What MIME type will a web server respond with for a

filename extension of .php?
• What are stateful web applications?


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Web Technologies

Network HTTP over TCP/IP

Server Platform: Windows, Mac, Unix, etc.

Web Server: Apache, IIS, Xitami, etc.

© K.Mc 2008 the University of Greenwich 2

• The web server responds with data

• Web pages are identified by a Uniform Resource Locator (URL)

© K.Mc 2008 the University of Greenwich 3

• Client and server computers both usually have:

© K.Mc 2008 the University of Greenwich 7

© K.Mc 2008 the University of Greenwich 8

© K.Mc 2008 the University of Greenwich 9

© K.Mc 2008 the University of Greenwich 10

Proxy Servers & Firewalls

© K.Mc 2008 the University of Greenwich 11

© K.Mc 2008 the University of Greenwich 12

© K.Mc 2008 the University of Greenwich 13

Network Protocol Stack

© K.Mc 2008 the University of Greenwich 14

© K.Mc 2008 the University of Greenwich 15

© K.Mc 2008 the University of Greenwich 16

© K.Mc 2008 the University of Greenwich 17

© K.Mc 2008 the University of Greenwich 18

© K.Mc 2008 the University of Greenwich 19

© K.Mc 2008 the University of Greenwich 20

GET /~k.mcmanus/index.html HTTP/1.1

Blank line Headers

Data – none for GET

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

HTTP Server Status Codes

301 Moved Permanently

302 Moved Temporarily

400 Bad Request – not understood

403 Forbidden – not authorized

404 Not Found

500 Internal Server Error

© K.Mc 2008 the University of Greenwich 23

• The stateless nature of HTTP has a big impact on how web

© K.Mc 2008 the University of Greenwich 24

© K.Mc 2008 the University of Greenwich 26

URIs, URLs and URNs

• Uniform Resource Locator (URL)

• Uniform Resource Name (URN)

Multipurpose Internet Mail

© K.Mc 2008 the University of Greenwich 28

Domain Name System DNS

© K.Mc 2008 the University of Greenwich 29

Domain Name System DNS

© K.Mc 2008 the University of Greenwich 30

© K.Mc 2008 the University of Greenwich 32

© K.Mc 2008 the University of Greenwich 33

Cascading Style Sheets CSS

© K.Mc 2008 the University of Greenwich 34

Client Side Scripting

© K.Mc 2008 the University of Greenwich 36

© K.Mc 2008 the University of Greenwich 37

Multipart HTML documents

Server Side Scripting

© K.Mc 2008 the University of Greenwich 39

Evolution of the Web

HTML HTML XML XML

Generation 1 Generation 2 Generation 3

© K.Mc 2008 the University of Greenwich 40