Talk:Hello world/Web server

Is this supposed to be a server that does its own HTTP protocol, or just a CGI will do? --Ledrug 21:49, 30 June 2011 (UTC)

CGI is fine for producing the text, but starting a server program cannot be done outside of the task. A valid solution must show how to get a server process running. I was hoping a number of languages would be able to show off easy built-in or library support for this, but I didn't want to exclude languages where the easiest solution was to launch a copy of some existing server program. In this case, a valid solution must both generate the text to serve (writing it to a static text file would be fine) and start a server that will serve the text. —Sonia 01:10, 1 July 2011 (UTC)

Ok. Though if launching Apache is allowed, there's really no meaningful limit left—

Limit--to languages that can solve the task? I didn't want to task to be especially limiting, but there will certainly be a few languages where solution is difficult or impossible.

BTW, the Go code didn't seem to server HTTP headers. Is it handled by the package, or is it not part of the requirement? --Ledrug 01:24, 1 July 2011 (UTC)

Interesting! This isn't an area where I know a lot, but I'll look into it. I would expecte an HTTP server to serve whatever headers are standard for the protocol. (I confess, I just hacked up a couple of lines of code, saw that Chrome displayed the text, and called it done.) —Sonia 01:49, 1 July 2011 (UTC)

> echo -n "GET / HTTP/1.0\r\n\r\n" | nc localhost 8080
HTTP/1.0 200 OK
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Date: Fri, 01 Jul 2011 01:59:50 GMT

Goodbye, World!

Should there be more? —Sonia 02:02, 1 July 2011 (UTC)

No it's fine, as long as there is 200 OK and Content-type, it's valid. I was merely curious since if no headers are served, most clients would be pretty upset. Thanks for the test. --Ledrug 02:13, 1 July 2011 (UTC)

Clarfication: accepts multiple client

"Multiple" means "simultaneously" or "sequentially"? I suggest leaving this up to the coders, but make it clear, since this task it self doesn't really need to involve forking or threads. --Ledrug 00:42, 2 July 2011 (UTC)

Good point. For Hello World, I should think sequentially should be fine. —Sonia 01:38, 2 July 2011 (UTC)

does the task mandate HTTP/1.0 or above?

The task description should specify if the server should implement HTTP/1.0 or above, currently some examples implement a plain socket that returns one text line, which is possible in HTTP 0.9, but is not valid in current clients. E.g. in the Java server, curl and wget:

wget http://localhost:8080
--22:36:36--  http://localhost:8080/
           => `index.html.2'
Resolving localhost... done.
Connecting to localhost[127.0.0.1]:8080... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response...
Read error (No such file or directory) in headers.
Retrying.

curl -i localhost:8080
curl: (56) Failure when receiving data from the peer

Regular browsers still handle HTTP 0.9 replies though.

The task is supposed to be minimal, but by "browser" I was thinking a modern browser, and a solution that doesn't work with wget and curl does seem to be a stretch. Perhaps it would make sense to add a task requirement along the lines of "Use a modern browser or client program to test your server. Showing output is not neccessary, but state the relevant details of the program you used. (OS, version, browser, version, etc.)" —Sonia 22:48, 28 October 2011 (UTC)

my point is that the solutions neither process the request line (the reply is sent before the request is sent) nor provide the proper header (some solutions like C at least provide headers) --AlexLehm 10:15, 30 October 2011 (UTC)