Project 2: Multithreaded Web Server

You say that the server should be a functional HTTP/1.0 server. Is there a specific specification we should be following? I found this website http://www.jmarshall.com/easy/http/. It had some information about GET/HEAD/POST. Should we be implementing these?

The web page that you point out is a good intro to HTTP. Specifications for HTTP/1.0 should all be the same. I hope you're not finding differences in the specs--maybe just in their wording.

You should implement all three, GET/HEAD/POST. For the POST requests, you're not redirecting requests to a script or an application to handle the requests, so you can basically treat them like GET requests. You'll just ignore the irrelevant data that a client sends. HEAD is a little less work than the other two, so you may want to start with HEAD.

How should I get started?

You should be able to easily get the basic server started, accepting connections from clients. (Refer to the examples from class on July 27.)

Try using a browser to connect to your server (on the appropriate port) and see what the client sends you. This should help you get an idea of what the HTTP protocol is, if the link above doesn't help.

Another independent starting point is to parse the XML configuration file and get the configuration data out of it. You can use the example code from class (080106) to get you started.

What file types do we need to support? Or, am I thinking the wrong way, and file types are handled on the client end and not on the server?

Your web server does need to know the type of the file so that it can send the correct type back to the browser. (We saw something similar in our servlets, which had to say that the content type was "text/html".)

Your server should handle the following types of files:

HTML files: the content-type is "text/" followed by the file extension
Text files: the content-type is "text/plain"
Images: the content-type is "image/" and the type of the file, e.g., "image/jpeg"

For other files, you can find out the content types from your browser by viewing the file's information. You can support other file types for extra credit (up to 5 points).

Do we need to handle directories?

Yes, you do. You should first check if the welcome files are in the directory. Otherwise, what does a web server give you if none of the welcome files is there?

Do we need other test cases besides the CIS home page?

Yes, you do. You should be able to demonstrate the full functionality of your web server.