The Interwebz

This was definitely an interesting reading. Nice to find out that the origins of the internet came about in the 1960s because the department of defense became interested in developing a new large scale computer network. The purpose of this network: communications, program sharing, and remote computer access for researchers working on defense related contracts. Sebesta calls the internet a huge collection of computers connected in a communication network. In fact some of the devices connected to the internet are not computers at all. (He mentions printers and plotters) Citing that in 1982 TCP/IP Transmissions Control Protocol/Internet Protocol became the standard for computer network connections.

Internet nodes are identified by names which is their numeric memory address also called their IP (Internet Protocol) address. In 1998 a new IPv6 standard was approved, this change was to expand the address size from 32 bits to 128 bits. In an abstract sense the web is a vast collection of documented some of which are connected by links. Sebesta says that the web and internet are not the same. The internet is a collection of computers and deices connected by equipment that allows them to communicate with eah other. The web is a collection of software and protocol that has been installed on most, if not all , of the computers on the internet.

Web Browsers are when two computers communicate over some network, in many cases one acts a client and the other as a server. The client initiates the conversation. Web servers are programs that provide documents to requesting browsers. Servers are slave programs. The most commonly used Web servers are Apache. This is very cool for me because I have a  basic understanding of Apache.

It was cool to learn about what all these names actually do. Javascript is a client side scripting language that can be embedded into xhtml. flash is a framework to building animation into XHTML documents. Ajax is an approach to building Web applications in which partial document requests are handled asynchronously  Ajax can significantly increase speed of user interactions.  PHP is the server-side equivalent of JavaScript. All of these different languages I am so looking forward to using and understanding in the future. I am ready to code.