9.1. The Skipped Server Chapters

Both for the sake of time and to focus on the key Network Programming concepts, we are skipping several, very good chapter from The Text Book, which deal with the general topic of network servers. Here are just a few comments about those chapters.

9.1.1. Chapter 16 – SocketServer

• General server framework
• Connectionless protocols, like HTTP, where the server receives one request from a client and send back one reply

9.1.2. Chapter 17 – SimpleXMLRPCServer

• Module that provides a server framework for XML-RPC.
• XML-RPC client side is covered in chapter 8, which we gave minimal coverage of.

See also

See XML and XML-RPC, XML-RPC and XML-RPC Example for an example showing the impressive functionality and ease of use of XML-RPC.

9.1.3. Chapter 18 – CGI

• Server side web programming, which is covered in CMST 335.

9.1.4. Chapter 19 – mod_python

• Server side web programming support from within the Apache web server
• More efficient than CGI
• Same concept as PHP (from CMST 335), except with Python

See also

See the discussion of server side web applications and WSGI from chapter 8.

9.1.5. Chapter 20 – Forking

• Process Creation – fork() is the Unix system call to duplicate the current process.
• Windows does process creation totally different.  Windows based network servers do not use process creation.
• Even in Unix, forking has limited application for network servers