The architecture of a prediction service

Now with a clear goal in mind—to share and scale the results of our predictive modeling using a web application—what are the components required to accomplish this objective?

The first is the client: this could be either a web browser or simply a user entering a curl command in the terminal (see Aside). In either case, the client sends requests using hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP), a standard transport convention to retrieve or transmit information over a network (Berners-Lee, Tim, Roy Fielding, and Henrik Frystyk. Hypertext transfer protocol--HTTP/1.0. No. RFC 1945. 1996). An important feature of the HTTP standard is that the client and server do not have to 'know' anything about how the other is implemented (for example, which programming language is used to write these components) because the message will remain consistent between them regardless by virtue of following the HTTP standard.

The next component is the server, which receives HTTP...