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HTTP Servers

The 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.

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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

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