When sitting at your computer there are several processes' that take place to enable you to jump from site to site. When you type in a web address and hit enter your browser contacts a DNS (domain name server) to resolve the address into an IP address. An IP address is a sequence of numbers that relate to a web server some where on the Internet. Your browser then contacts the web server using a protocol called Hypertext transferre Protocol (HTTP), it talks to the server on port 80 the HTTP port and sends a GET request for an HTML file, the server then responds by sending the file back to the browser. The browser then reads the HTML and renders the page accordingly.
If you enter information on to a web page and send any details you more than likely enter them into a form on the web page, the form then sends it to what is called a CGI (common gateway interface) programme to process the information. A CGI script as they are known can be written in many different languages such as Java, Perl, Visual Basic, PHP and many more. They often send the data to a database so it can then be sorted, stored and used at a later date. |
