Dr. Sawood Alam
<salam@cs.odu.edu>

The CS 431/531 Web Server Design course focuses on complete understanding of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and implementation of a web server (not a web application). The course is programming intensive, prerequisites include the understanding of network (socket) programming. Students in this course decide their own implementation language within the Unix/Linux environment; the lectures are about HTTP and not about any particular programming language.

Location: Online and on-campus E&CS 3102

Time: Wednesdays, 4:20-7:00pm (Eastern Time)

Office Hours: Wednesdays, 3:00-4:00pm (Eastern Time) and by appointment (E&CS 3102 and online)

Recent/Upcoming Lectures

NOV
30

Lecture 13

  • InterPlanetary File System (IPFS)
  • InterPlanetary Wayback (IPWB)
  • Decentralized Web Archiving and Replay
DEC
07

Student Presentations

  • Cloud Hosting Tutorial

All Lectures

Due Assignments

DEC
03

Assignment 0-5

Available Points: 9

HTTP design improvements, WARC file comparison, and in the wild examples of non-standard status codes, wrong MIME types, and unsafe methods.

  • Non-standard status codes
  • PATCH, PUT, and DELETE methods
  • Wrong API MIME type
  • HTTP/1.1 design improvements
  • WARC file comparison

Assignment 0-5 Details

NOV
28

Assignment 5

Available Points: 20

This assignment builds on top of previous assignments and primarily focuses on unsafe methods and server-side execution (CGI).

Assignment 5 Details

All Assignments

Reading Materials

As the course progresses we will primarily be exploring and implementing parts of the following Request for Comments (RFCs). We might also refer to some additional specifications as we find them relevant.

Current RFCs

Historical RFCs