Chapter 19. Ruby and Web Applications

18.3. Conclusion

In this chapter, we've had a good introduction to lower-level networking, including simple servers and clients. We've seen how to write a client for an existing server that we didn't create.

We've looked at higher level protocols such as POP and IMAP for receiving mail. Likewise we've looked at SMTP for sending mail. In connection with these, we've seen how to encode and decode file attachments. We've had an exposure to NNTP through the mail-news gateway code.

Now it's time to look more closely at a subset of this topic. One of the most important types of network programming today is web development, which is the topic of the next chapter.