Intro to HTTP and URIs

Learning Goals

  • Use the command-line utilities curl and nc to experiment with and learn about HTTP and cookies

  • Understand the basics of how HTTP requests and responses are constructed, and the interaction between a SaaS client and server using HTTP

  • Understand some of the most common HTTP error codes and what they mean

  • Understand how cookies are managed between clients and servers

Prerequisites

You will need to know how to open a terminal or shell window in your computing environment, and how to view and edit files. Throughout this exercise, we will refer to this window as the shell window; the commands you type at its prompt are shell commands, that is, they tell the shell to run a program and display the output.

Setup

In the beginning was the command line, and that’s where we’ll be for this intro to HTTP. We will use two command-line tools. cURL (pronounced “curl”) to act as a SaaS client, and netcat (pronounced “netcat”) to act as a SaaS server.

We will also be working with two real web sites: a random-word generator that will also be featured in a future assignment, and a simple cookie demo site written just for this assignment and deployed on Heroku.

Start by visiting the random word generator in your favorite browser to get a “user’s view” of what’s on the front page.

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