Operating Systems: Concurrent and Distributed Software Design

28.10. Summary

The internet-based World Wide Web is an example of a large-scale, widely distributed system. We studied its overall architecture and the mechanisms used for naming, location, communication, security and scalability. We saw that the commonly used names are location dependent, built above DNS. The web mechanisms do not address the avoidance of dangling references when the owner moves a page thus changing its name. The communications protocol HTTP is built above TCP. Its original design deficiencies, requiring a new TCP connection for every transfer involved in a composite document, were corrected in later versions thus improving on the original bad performance. The original document markup language HTML combined the specification ...