Modern Systems Programming with Scala Native

Understanding How a Server Works

As you saw in Chapter 3, ​Writing a Simple HTTP Client​, writing a simple TCP client is mostly straightforward. We have to jump through a few more hoops to make our server work, though, so before we go into the details, let’s take a step back to look at the big picture.

A typical server program does three things:

1. It accepts incoming connections on a known TCP port.
2. It receives requests from clients.
3. It sends back a response to each request.

At first glance this isn’t much different from what a TCP client does. The confounding difference is that a server must perform all these actions at the same time, with an unknown number of uncoordinated clients. Later in this chapter, we’ll use some of the multiprocessing techniques ...