Java Reference
In-Depth Information
As can be seen, Recipe 1.2 implements a very simple, yet functional, web server. This
web server is far from being “industrial strength”, but it would serve as a great starting point
for any sort of application that would require a built-in web server.
Summary
This topic is about how to write programs that browse the web, just as a human does.
Such programs are called bots. To create bots, it is important to review how web browsing
works at a technical level, to form a foundation for the rest of the topic. In this chapter, the
general structure of web browsing and HTTP requests were explored. The two recipes in this
chapter were both web servers.
The first web server did nothing more than display the text “Hello World” to any request;
however, the second example implemented a full file based web server. Both of these recipes
focused on socket programming and web servers. Socket programming uses the
Socket
and
ServerSocket
classes provided by Java. Although socket programming is touched
on, most of this topic will focus on creating applications that access web servers. These ap-
plications will mainly use the Java HTTP classes to access a web server, rather than direct
sockets.
The next chapter will show how to use certain tools to examine the interaction between
a web browser and server. These tools will be very helpful, when you create programs of
your own to access web servers. They will allow the programmer to understand exactly what
information the desired web server expects.
