There was this time when I need to build a program to check whether my web server is running fine. To determine that my web server is running fine, I wrote a Java applet that sends a HTTP GET to one of my web resources when the applet runs for the first time. And to keep the applet light, I look into Java in-built features for sending HTTP GETs to my server. This post documents a proof of concept that I did to communicate with my server endpoint via HTTP GET using Java in-built features.
I need to create a Java solution that will be able to send some bulk processing information back to a HTTP server endpoint. The Java solution should be as lean as possible, using as many facilities that Java provides out of the box. Luckily for me, Java do provides the java.net.HttpURLConnection class for me to build my solution. This post details a proof of concept which I did to get to know more about the java.net.HttpURLConnection class.
I had decided to include node.js into my toolbox. In the process of getting myself acquainted with node.js, I had jotted down some key points for myself for developing node.js applications in the future. This posts list those key points, and I will update the list as and when I learn more about this useful tool.
There are times when we want to push a dynamically generated file to our users based on their inputs. That file could be an excel file that holds payment transaction reports for a time period or a tabulation of guest names who had accepted invitations to our corporate house warming.
In such cases, the user should be presented with a dialog box which lets him decide whether to save it somewhere in her local filesystem or open the file for viewing with an appropriate application in his computer.
For example, in my tool for generating boilerplate coding from a list of country names, I am presented with some input fields where I can submit some instructions to format the output of the boilerplate coding. And upon clicking on the “Generate” button, I am shown a dialog box that looks like the following:
Let’s cook up a simple scenario to demonstrate this idea with jQuery.
Suppose we are creating a simple game for the user to draw a random number. For this, we have a text field for the user to write his name. There will be a number dial that changes at random. When the user clicks on the “Get lucky number” button, the browser will present a text file for the user to download.
The text file will contain the user’s name and the number taken from the number dial at the instance when he clicks on the button.
When we are in the business of creating web applications, we are always crafting HTTP responses.
A HTTP communication session is initated with a HTTP request from the client and is ended with a HTTP response from the server. In order for a HTTP communication session to take place successfully, the server must be reachable via an IP Address and a port number.
However, a successful HTTP communication session does not imply that the client always get what it wants from the server. Within the HTTP response, the server tells the client whether or not the HTTP request is plausible to fulfill via HTTP status codes.
This is a discussion of some of the status codes that I use at the HTTP server end, in an environment where most of my HTTP clients are robotic in nature.
Ideally, when we build web applications which generate files on demand, we will want our users to be able to use their browsers to save a copy of our files in their local harddisk. For instance, the tool for generating customized codes for countries in the world, which I had created earlier, will tell browsers to prompt a download dialog box after users had submitted the form.
However, this is not the default behavior of browsers. By default, browsers will show the contents of a HTTP response generated by our PHP script in the browser window. This behaviour can be seen when I point my browser to http://www.techcoil.com/robots.txt.
In this post, I will discuss how we can tell browsers to show a dialog box for users to save the contents generated by a PHP script as a file.
With the ubiquity of web browsers, it can be ideal for the user interaction layer of applications to be web based. The most common approaches to building web based applications is to write server side scripts running on web servers. However, these approaches require server programs to be present in the production environment.
What if you want the web server functionality to be contained in your C# program? In C#, there is a System.Net.HttpListener class which listens for HTTP requests from clients.
This post is part 1 of the sequel. In this post, I will introduce the HttpListener class and how we can use it to receive HTTP requests from clients in our C# program.
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