Let's recapitulate a bit; in Chapter 1, The World Wide Web, you learned about the World Wide Web and how all these millions of pages are accessed by people using a browser that sends requests to a web server using the HTTP protocol. Well, people will still use browsers that send HTTP requests, but we just tossed the web server, now what do we do? We write one. Scary? No, it will be a lot of fun. Writing low-level code is not your thing? No sweat, somebody already did it for you. There is a whole community writing code for node.js that everybody else can use. That code is made available as what is referred to as modules, and of course there is a HTTP module available to us.

Another thing the web server did for us was to actually analyze the URL the user typed and explore the file system to see whether there is a physical file, for example, an hello.html file, and serve it up back to the client. We will have to write that too. This is cool because it will give us full control over what...