Key Aspects Of Website Building: An Essay.

HTTP Including Request/Response Methods

The process of web building has been widely referred to the tasks related with developing websites to host through internet or intranet (Bates, Phalen and Moran 2016).

The charitable organization “Your Earth, Your Home” needs to join online to perform various tasks. A report is required to generate for encouraging people to stay involved and active.

The following report explains various aspects required to be known to build websites. It outlines http, programming control structures, class and objects in object-oriented programming and web security and authentication.

The “Hyper Text Transport Protocol” or HTTP has been the most popular protocol applied and utilized in Internet. It has been consisting of the pairs of request-response. The request is done from the computer to the server, while the response works from the server.

For the generic sockets, this pair has comprised of the overall inbound contents and the outbound streams. This has been not helpful for the sockets every time. There always lies a scope of further improvement. The requests have been appearing in session window as they have been recorded. There have been two distinct methods to view the session windows. They are the structure and sequence views. The structure view helped in viewing the requests in the tree organized by host name and next the directories/folders under the host. The sequence view is useful in viewing the requests in a sequential manner that has been occurring (Carr et al. 2015). The headers and bodies of HTTP request and response could be always seen either as a plain test or in binary. Special viewers are also present for the headers and bodies enhancing the display.

The HTTP protocol has been defining particular set of the request and response methods. The clients could make use of any methods for sending request or response messages to and from the HTTP server. The GET has been the most common instance of HTTP request method (Sinha 2017). Clients could use this method to request, or “get” for any resource piece from the HTTP server. Other request methods include HEAD, POST, PUT, DELETE, TRACE, OPTIONS, CONNECT and the other methods of extensions.

Likewise some of the response methods in .NET Framework are “AddCacheDependency(CacheDependency[])”, “AddCacheItemDependencies(ArrayList)” and so on.

The idea behind session management has been to recognize and differentiate every visitor over the website. It maintains information as the visitors move through the website. However, without few preserving state methods, this could not be performed. As a result of this, one of the methods is needed to be used. However, instead of transmitting every state variables between the web server and browser, only one unique number of string indentifying that session particularly is been transmitted. After receipting the identifier the web server looks up and then loads that corresponding information of state of the session (Readshaw 2015). Most of the platforms of server-side scripting have been including some features. These are the management of sessions, generating session identifier known as the “session key” or “session ID”, loading and storing state information as required. Lastly the purging of the session automatically from the memory is done. This is after a particular time elapses without any activity from associated browser. This is to free the web server resources. 

Session Management and Stateless Programming

On the other hand, the web protocol, HTTP has been also stateless. Put in other words, every request made between the browsers to the web-server, the later one entirely forgets the previous requests. This means that it never preserve any state or memory preferred after any request gets fulfilled (Jalan et al. 2016). For example, as any web-age contains various images, the browser would firstly request HTML document that has made up the page. Then to display every image, the browser request the image file from web server. The web server then hand back the files, without being aware of the requests generating from the similar browser.

One of the crucial aspects of the programming has been the controlling of the subsequent statements. The control structures have been used for controlling the flow of the programs. They enable the programmer in determining the order by which the program statements gets executed. They allow performing two things. Firstly, some statements are skipped while others are executed. Secondly, repeat any statement as the condition gets true (O'Kane 2014).

The modern or structured programming comprises of three primary control structures.

Sequence: This is series of steps. The classic examples of sequence are manipulations of data, calculations and the running of functions or subroutines. Notably, the sequence should have a single entry point with an exit point. As structured programming allow the usage of three distinct control structures, the block or group of programming commands should have exactly a single entry and exit always.

Decision: This has been the act to make choice. Decisions that are most commonly encountered are the “If-Then-Else” and “Switch-Case”. The former one is the straightforward decision between the two distinct choices. The later one deals with the picking up of the option between the long lists from the choices.

Loop or repetition: This is the act to repeat one or more actions. Much of the computer powers have been able to perform repetition choices again and again. This takes place millions or more times at particular cases. The capability to do something repeatedly again and again in huge number of repetitions is one of most significant capability of the computers. Primarily the For Loop, Do Loop and Do while are the most basic repetition structure (Landhäußer and Hug 2015).

The OPP or “object oriented programming is the approach to solve problems where every computation has been carried out by using objects. The object is program’s component knowing how to do particular actions and make interaction with other elements in the program. They are the basic units of OOP. The codes in OOP are organized around the objects (Smith 2015). As any object is put, they interact with others making any desired outcome.

Figure 1: “Relation between class and objects taking analogy of car”

(Source: Phpenthusiast.com, 2017)

The class is the blueprint of the objects. It defines is object’s contents along with describing the aggregate of the data fields or instance variables and the operations or methods.  The object is the element or instance of that class. They contain the behavior of their classes. The object is regarded as the actual component of any program. The class, on the other hand, makes specifications how the instances have been created and their behavior. Class can be regarded as an idea and the object makes the embodiment of that idea. The class is created before the object (Zeigler 2014). For instance, a person is needed to be used in any program. He is needed to be described with his particular activities. The “person” is the class here providing blueprint of the person’s appearance and activities. For actualizing the person in the program, an object is needed to be created. 

Programming Control Structures

The basic authentication of HTTP is the method for clients to deliver one username and password while any request is made. This has been the simplest way possible for enforcing the access control. This is because it never needs the sessions, cookies or anything else. For using this, the client needs to send the header of “authorization” with every request it has been making (Bonneau et al. 2014). The user name and the password are not been encrypted by constructed in the following way. They have been concatenated into one string “username: password”. The string has been encoded with the Bae64. The basic keywords are put before that encoded value.

The internet is however, a dangerous place. This is because of its unavailability due to service attack denial, showing modified or damaged information over the home pages. In the other cases of high-profiles, numerous passwords, credit card details and email addresses are leaked into public domain. This exposes the users to personal embarrassment with financial risks.  Here lies the purpose of the web security that prevents any kind of attacks. In formal words, it has been the practice or act to safeguard the websites from any unauthorized disruption, destruction, modification, usage and access. The efficient web-securities have been requiring the efforts to design around entire website (Gohel 2015). This includes the web application, configuration of web server, policies to create and renew passwords and the client-side coding.

Conclusion:

The building of a website has been including the web designing, web content developing, network security configuration, client/server side scripting and many more. The clients use the request and response methods of HTTP to send and receive request and response respectively. The session management has been maintaining data while the visitors roam around the websites. However, due to the stateless property of HTTP protocol, any memory is not preserved after any requests get fulfilled. The control structures are used to recognize the order of execution of program statements. The classes in OOP have been defining its contents of objects and describe the aggregate of instance variables and methods. The authentication is needed in the websites mainly for accessing and the web security protects the site from any unauthorized mishaps. 

References:

Bates, M.S., Phalen, L. and Moran, C.G., 2016. If you build it, will they reflect? Examining teachers' use of an online video-based learning website. Teaching and Teacher Education, 58, pp.17-27.

Bonneau, J., Felten, E.W., Mittal, P. and Narayanan, A., 2014. Privacy concerns of implicit secondary factors for web authentication. In SOUPS Workshop on “Who are you.

Carr, H., Agarwal, P. and Chan, S.W., Oracle International Corporation, 2015. System and method for supporting asynchronous request/response in a network environment. U.S. Patent Application 14/864,621.

Gohel, H., 2015. Design and development of combined algorithm computing technique to enhance web security. International Journal of Innovative and Emerging Research in Engineering (IJIERE), 2(1), pp.76-79.

Jalan, R., Xu, F., Kannan, L.N. and Szeto, R.W.L., A10 Networks, Inc., 2016. Combining stateless and stateful server load balancing. U.S. Patent 9,270,774.

Landhäußer, M. and Hug, R., 2015, May. Text understanding for programming in natural language: control structures. In Proceedings of the Fourth International Workshop on Realizing Artificial Intelligence Synergies in Software Engineering (pp. 7-12). IEEE Press.

O'Kane, M., 2014. A Web-based Introduction to Programming: Essential Algorithms, Syntax, and Control Structures Using PHP, HTML, and MySQL. Carolina Academic Press.

Phpenthusiast.com. (2017). classes, objects, methods, properties | PHPenthusiast. [online] Available at: https://phpenthusiast.com/object-oriented-php-tutorials/create-classes-and-objects [Accessed 13 Jul. 2017].

Readshaw, N.I., International Business Machines Corporation, 2015. User session management for web applications. U.S. Patent 8,955,094.

Sinha, S., 2017. How Request, Response Work in Laravel 5. In Beginning Laravel (pp. 161-165). Apress.

Smith, B., 2015. Object-oriented programming. In Advanced ActionScript 3(pp. 1-23). Apress.

Zeigler, B.P., 2014. Object-oriented simulation with hierarchical, modular models: intelligent agents and endomorphic systems. Academic press.