Exploring the client-server architecture

In the context of HTTP servers, clients generally mean the web browsers that enable end users to read the information being served, whereas servers mean long-running processes that serve information in the form of documents to those clients. These documents are most commonly written in HTML and are used as a means of communication between the client and the server. Clients are responsible for enabling the end user to send a request to the server and display the response from the server. Browsers allow the users to retrieve and display information without requiring any knowledge of HTML or web servers, by just providing an address (the URL).

At a given time, many clients can access a server’s information. This puts the burden of scaling on the servers as they need to be designed with the ability to respond to multiple requests within an acceptable period of time. Now that we understand a web server’s primary goal, let’s move on to the protocol that enables communication between web servers: HTTP.