Networking and Distributed Computing¶

Key Question

How can we write programs that communicate over a network with other programs, and tackle large tasks using many machines?

Client-server model, peer-to-peer model, protocols, request and response as a way to organize modules and their interactions to support a clear set of responsibilities.
Stateless versus keep-alive connections, latency and throughput issues, gethostbyname, gethostbyaddr, IPv4 versus IPv6, struct sockaddr hierarchy of structs, network-byte order.
Ports, socket file descriptors, socket, connect, bind, accept, read, write, simple echo server, time server, concurrency issues, spawning threads to isolate and manage single conversations.
C++ layer over raw I/O file descriptors, introduction to sockbuf and sockstream C++ classes.
HTTP 1.0 and 1.1, header fields, GET, HEAD, POST, complete versus chunked payloads, response codes, web caching and consistency protocols.
IMAP, custom protocols, Dropbox and iCloud reliance on variations of HTTP.

Lectures¶