Everything you ever wanted to know about web requests

The web presents a strange programming model because it forces you into writing an application that runs on two computers at once. This presents a number of challenges in application design and state management. All of these design issues, however, are ultimately influenced and built on top of the fundamental relationship that the browser has with the server.

The goal of this lesson is to fully describe that browser-server relationship. If you understand the details about how the browser makes requests to the server, you will be able to make better decisions when faced with higher-level design choices.

We will target:

• What's in a web request
• Life cycle of a web request
• Ajax and Ajax Styles
• The web security model

Ted's notes (no slides this time)

See Also

• W3C Navigation Timing Recommendation
• Request Timing Overview Diagram
• Nihonbashi through the ages: Nihonbashi 1 Nihonbashi 2 Nihonbashi 3" (this will only make sense if you came to lecture)
• HTML5 Rocks, an awesome guide to HTML5

Journal Question

Please submit your response by class time on each Monday. Here are the Journal guidelines and submission instructions.

Geek Cred

Gopher, the Web that almost was

(from Wikipedia):

Gopher is a TCP/IP application layer protocol designed for distributing, searching, and retrieving documents over the Internet. Strongly oriented towards a menu-document design, the Gopher protocol presented an alternative to the World Wide Web in its early stages, but ultimately HTTP became the dominant protocol. The Gopher ecosystem is often regarded as the effective predecessor of the World Wide Web.