Introduction

Once again, we’ll return to the request-response pattern diagram.

We revisit this diagram because it is so central to how HTTP servers work. At the heart, a server’s primary responsibility is to respond to an incoming request. Thus, in writing a web server, our primary task is to determine what to respond with. With static web servers, the answer is pretty simple - we map the virtual path supplied by the URL to a file path on the file server. But the URL supplied in a request doesn’t have to correspond to any real object on the server - we can create any object we want, and send it back.

In our examples, we’ve built several functions that build specific kinds of responses. Our serveFile() function serves a response representing a static file. Our listDirectory() function generates an index for a directory, or if the directory contained a index.html file, served it instead. And our dynamic servePost() from our blog served a dynamically generated HTML page that drew data from a database.

Each of these functions created a response. But how do we know which of them to use? That is the question that we will be grappling with in this chapter - and the technical term for it is routing.