Network applications are the raisons d’ ętre of a computer network - if we couldn't think of any useful applications, there wouldn't be any need to design networking protocols to support them. Over the past 40 years, various ingenious and wonderful network applications have
Consider you have an idea for a new network application. Maybe this application will be a great service to humanity, or will please your professor, or will bring you great wealth, or will simply be fun to develop. Whatever the motivation may be, let's now study how you
Before diving into software coding, you should have a big architectural plan for your application. Keep in mind that an application's architecture is particularly different from the network architecture (e.g., the five-layer Internet architecture discussed in "Computer Networks
Before building your network application, you also need a basic understanding of how the programs, running in various end systems, communicate with each other. In the terminology of operating systems, it is not in fact programs but processes that communicate. A process
Up until this point, we have been studying transport services that a computer network could provide generally. Let's now get more particular and look at the type of application support provided by the Internet. The Internet (and, more usually, TCP/IP networks) makes two
We have just studied that network processes communicate with each other by sending messages into sockets. But how are these messages structured? What are the meanings of the various fields in the messages? When do the processes send the messages? These questions bring
We have just studied that network processes communicate with each other by sending messages into sockets. But how are these messages structured? What are the meanings of the various fields in the messages? When do the processes send the messages? These questions bring
Until the early 1990s the Internet was used mainly by researchers, academics, and university students to log in to remote hosts, to transfer files from local hosts to remote hosts and vice versa, to receive and send news, and to receive and send electronic mail. Though these applications
In various Internet applications, the client and server communicate for an extensive period of time, with the client making a series of requests and the server responding to reach of the requests. Depending on the application and on how the application is being used, the series of
The HTTP specifications [RFC 2616]) contain the definitions of the HTTP message formats. There are two types of HTTP messages, request messages and response messages, both of which are discussed below.