Philip Repsher October 29 th, 2008 Or Maybe November 3 rd, 2008

 In this presentation, I will guide you through how to create a simple ruby web server and a simple ruby web client to get information from the server.  Webrick  Simplified web server library included in ruby since Ruby  net/http class  Basic Ruby framework for HTTP interaction, we will use it for our client.

 Webrick is a library included in the Ruby standard library dedicated to creating HTTP servers  Webrick is a very easy way to create HTTP servers.  A few commands -  Require “webrick”  WEBrick::HTTPServer.new(address, port)  Trap “INT”  Let’s go make a simple web server now

 The server we just made doesn’t truly do anything  After creating a server, servlets are mounted onto the server as subdirectories ( to provide more functionality  Each time a servlet is called, Ruby creates a new instance of the servlet in its own thread and runs it.

 Mount – after you make a servlet, it must be mounted on the server before the server is started.  do_GET – A method with this name will service all GET requests.  do_GET methods have two arguments, the request and the response, or req and resp.  Let’s make some servlets!

 Webrick comes installed with several useful Servlets  Filehandler – if the server is fed a path when starting it automatically sets up a filehandler to serve that directory  CGIhandler-If the directory a filehandler is set up for contains any CGI files, the server will automatically set up a CGIhandler to handle the execution of these files.

 Net/http is a ruby class that provides access to World Wide Web documents and information via HTTP.  As such, it is the class to use to make a client that will access the web server and report back.  Require ‘net/http’

 Next we need to set up the client. This client will send a request to the server for info, and then print the info out when it is received.  This client also needs to include the uri library to parse the URL for the net/http command.  We could also add some time commands to see how long the get takes.

 There are many more advanced Ruby server frameworks out there  In Particular, Ruby on Rails is very popular  Ruby on Rails is a Ruby development framework set up to assist in the making of ruby web applications, particularly database driven ones.

 servlets.html servlets.html  ml_webrick.html ml_webrick.html  doc.org/stdlib/libdoc/net/http/rdoc/index.ht ml doc.org/stdlib/libdoc/net/http/rdoc/index.ht ml   doc.org/docs/ProgrammingRuby/ doc.org/docs/ProgrammingRuby/