HttpServerClient

In this project, we used sockets to implement a simple web client that communicates with a web server using a restricted subset of HTTP. The main objective of this project is to give you hands-on experience with UNIX sockets.

Server Side

Our web server accepts incoming connection requests. It should then look for the GET request and pick out the name of the requested file. If the request is POST then it sends OK message and wait for the uploaded file from the client. Note that a GET request from a real WWW client may have several lines of optional information following the GET. These optional lines, though, will be terminated by a blank line ’\r\n’

How to run

You could run the Server using this command.

./HttpServer port-number

Client Side

Our web client must read and parse a series of commands from input file. For this assignment, only the GET and POST commands are required to be handled. The commands syntax should be as follows:

GET file-name host-name (port-number)
POST file-name host-name (port-number)

Note that the port-number is optional. If it is not specified, use the default HTTP port number, 8000. In response to the specified operation (GET or POST), the client must open a connection to an HTTP server on the specified host listening on the specified (or default) port-number. The receiver must display the file and then store it in the local directory. The client will shut down when reaching the end of file.

How to run

You could run the Client using this command.

./HttpClient server-ip port-number

Http 1.1

Our server support simple Http/1.1, consisting of persistent Connection and GET requests pipelining. In our definition of persistent connection, that is, after the results of a single request are returned (e.g., index.html), the server should by default leave the connection open for some period of time, allowing the client to reuse that connection to make subsequent requests. This timeout needs to be configured in the server and ideally should be dynamic based on the number of other active connections the server is currently supporting.

Additional Work

Our server works also with a FireFox web browser as Client.

Design Diagram

Below you will find the design diagram of the project.