Getting Up-and-Running with Web Development on the Raspberry Pi

The web is an amazing place. It's open, it's free, and almost all the information available to human kind is available any time, any place, and right at our fingertips. It is amazing that we live in an age when the web is just starting to show its colors and full potential. However, if you look at it from another point of view, all the internet really is is just a bunch of computers connected together with wires or, sometimes, wirelessly. It is this illusion that gives us the impression that the internet is actually something bigger, when in fact it's just a large network of computers.

After you are done with this book, you will be adding one more computer to this network, thus doing your own bit to make the internet a better place. To understand how the internet works, we have to first understand the role of each computer or component of the network. To do this, consider the following questions:

• Where does all the information on the internet come from?
• Where is it stored?
• How is it given to us?
• How do we interact with it?

By the end of this chapter, you should be able to answer these questions and also see how the Raspberry Pi can implement all these aspects of the web.
Specifically, we will cover the following topics:

• The overall architecture of a full-stack web application
• Different layers of web development
• Communication between the different layers of the stack
• How the Raspberry Pi will incorporate these layers and its role as a client and a server.