Practical GIS

Understanding the basics of the web

The Internet is designed to be an infinitely expandable network of computers. Therefore, servers and clients are only the end points of this network--there are additional nodes doing other tasks. For example, there are DNS servers, which map IP addresses to domain names; routers and switches forward the traffic. The web is one of the largest portions of the Internet, sharing specific, standardized content between end points. For creating a web application, the midpoints are out of concern. We only need to know how to configure web servers (backend), and how to write content for web clients (frontend).

There are a lot of other use cases of the Internet. Just think of video streaming, direct file sharing ...