Lesson 9: Parsing requests

So far we’ve been writing fairly useless HTTP servers. staticResponseServer (and its staticResponseServer_slow variant which we wrote in the previous lesson) never even reads the request messages that are sent to it; it always just replies with the same response. If we want our server to do something useful, we’re going to have to figure out how to read messages – not just write them – so that we can figure out exactly what the client is requesting from us. This means parsing the request message.