Principles of Network Applications

Network application architechture: Client-server architecture and peer-to-peer architecture.

Server has always-on host and permanent IP address, client can’t communicate with other
client or host and may be intermittently connected in Client-Server architecture. There is no
always on server and arbitrary end system directly communicate in peer-to-peer
architecture.

Sokets: process identifier, IP address and port

Transport layer protocol: TCP and UDP. TCP has reliable transport, congestion contol,
connection-oriented. UDP has unreliable data transfer.

In this lesson, I know the architecture of network applications, and how data transfer in
application layer and transfer layer.

HTTP
http uses TCP, client-server architecture. Non-persistent http create a TCP connection in per
request, and persistent http use the same TCP connection in multi requests, client request
persistent connect by set header “connection: keep-alive”.

http request message has request line, header line. http response message has status line,
header line, data.

http server identity user and connection by set cookies.

Web cache can make http faster, because cache server is closer than origin web server.

I know http how to work, and how to identity connection in stateless http service, how to
make it faster that global web service.

HTTPS
https is a encrypted ssl/tls connection HTTP. Send encrypted message and receive message,
decrypted it. It is more safe than HTTP.

DNS
Convert domain to IP address. Dns is a distriuted and hierarchical database, dns query ->
root dns sever -> TLD dns server -> authoritative dns server -> IP address.
Dns query has iterative query and recursive query.

the local DNS servers cache the TLD servers’ IP addresses, improves the DNS query response
time.

Dns records format: name, value, type, ttl. Type has A,NS,CNAME,MX

In this lesson, I know how to translate from domain to IP address, dns architecture, dns
record format and dns request/reply message.

In this module, I learn network application architecture, protocol in application layer, http
and https, dns. Understand web application how work in my daily life.In this module, I think
the most important thing is TCP/UDP, HTTP/HTTPS and DNS. TCP UDP is base of Application
layer, HTTP/HTTPS and DNS combine all web application, so it is very important that learn
these. I already know data transfer from end system to end system, after learned
application layer module, how data transfer when I click browser, how translate from
domain to IP address.

Application layer is most common network stack layer in our daily life, so I must learn to
knowledge about this module.