Not 100% sure if this is the right SE site to ask this, so feel free to move/warn me.
If I have a site www.mysite.com with a form on it and define its action as "http://www.mysite.com/handlepost" instead of "/handlepost", does it still get parsed as a local address by apache? That is, will apache figure out that I'm trying to send my form data to the same server the form resides on and do an automatic local post, or will the data be forced to make a round trip, going online, looking up the domain and actually being sent as an outside request?
Apache does not look at this information. It's your browser which does this job.
On the Apache side the job is only outputing content (html in this case), apache does not care about the way you write your url in this content.
On the browser side the page is analysed and GET requests (images,etc) are sent automatically to all collected url. The browser SHOULD know that relative url /foo are in fact http://currentsite/foo - or it's a really dump browser -. It is his job. And then it's his job to push the request to the right server (and to known if he should make a new DNS request, build a new HTTP connection, reuse an existing opened connection, build several connections -- usually max 3 conn per DNS--, etc). Apache does nothing in this part of the job.
So why absolute url are bad? Not because of the job the browser should have to do handling it (which is in fact nothing, his job is transforming relative url to absolute ones); It's because if your web application use only relative url the admin of the web server will have far more possibilities on proxying your application. For example:
he will be able to server your web application on several different DNS domains
(and then make the browser think he's talking to several servers, parallelizing static files downloads)
he could as use use this multi-domain to set up the application for different costumers
he could build an HTTPS access for external network access and an HTTP (without the S) access on a local name for the local network
And if your application is building the absolute url these tasks will become really harder.
dont use absolute URL's . As i feel it will do a round trip in your case as you have used round trip for the action part. so better use releative URL's
Related
Essentially what my use case is, a 3rd party server only support POST on a specific integration url. but I want a browser to hit it from a normal html link (I have no control over either systems code, I can only configure the destination url for the link)
To solve or this I have written a web hosted app (done in Mirth Connect - but the server tech in theory shouldn't matter). The objective of my app is to cat the GET and convert it to a POST
My systems logic:
My web server receives an HTTP GET from a browser, grabs the query strings.
The server then performs an HTTP POST on a 3rd party server, and grabs the html result
The server then returns the original html and delivers it as the result to the original http request from the browser
This works great, the issue comes in with content hosted on the 3rd party server that is referenced with a relative path (css, js, images, etc).
Because I have "tricked" the browser into thinking it received the html from my system, it looks on my server for the content (which will all 404).
Without having to handle the fetching of all the content myself, is there a way to tell a browser to redirect all further queries to the 3rd party server?
I tried making my HTTP GET return a status 301 or 302 with the location being the base address of the 3rd party server, but this obviously tells the browser to redirect completely
Figured it out.
I just had to intercept the html and inject a BASE tag .
Does making an image like
<img src="/images/thing.png"/>
just go through the physical directory of the local server, or does it do the equivalent of making a request to itself like
<img src="http://thesite.com/images/thing.png"/>
???
No.
A relative url is a simple way of writing an url (relative to the current url of the current document).
At the end your browser has an url, and has to run an HTTP request (if the protocol of this url is http) to retrieve the targeted document.
Note that the server is doing nothing, all the job is made by your browser (which rebuild the absolute url from the realtive url format -- with a starting / or not-- and the current document url).
So talking about 'browsing itself' makes no sense, the server can present a lot of different urls, some targeting other servers, some targeting the same server. At the end the browser reads the url and sends a request (and a relative url will quite certainly reach the same server but that's not even sure, several physical servers could be used to manage the same domain, some other actors between your browser and the final server may decide that for that url another system has to be contacted).
I've got some issues regarding images and secure access to the cloud (S3, in this case).
I do want to have direct access to avoid stressing my server so I do have two options:
1.) Generate a signed url on my server and send it back to client to load from
2.) Generate an Authorization-Header sent within the request from the client
Now, 1. & 2. work just fine, however, I am in trouble regarding images in html.
For 1.), images will be re-requested each time as the url changes every time and thus renders caching useless.
For 2.), caching would work as the url'd stay constant though I've seeked the net to figure how to add a custom http request header to image request including my security token without luck.
So, what options are left for me? How do others resolve that issue?
thanks
Alex
I have a splash page hosted at www.someserver.com and I'm looking to have one link on the page lead to a site hosted on another server, www.anotherserver.com. I probably need to keep these on distinct servers for the time being.
I'm hoping to have the whole thing appear under a a single company domain, www.company.com, and to have it so that when a user clicks on this link, you see neither www.someserver.com nor www.anotherserver.com, just www.company.com.
I know that I can set up some kind of domain masking (we're using GoDaddy for our hosting), but I'm worried that clicking out to www.anotherserver.com is going to keep this from all appearing under the same domain.
Is there a way to set this up so that links from and to both of these servers appear as www.company.com?
The good news is that what you are wanting to do is very common, it is called "proxying". I believe that godaddy uses apache so specifically you will want to look for mod_rewrite. You will more than likely simply have to provide a .htaccess file with the rewrite rules in it.
Here are the gotchas that you will run into though:
Client hits www.company.com
www.company.com pulls content from www.anotherserver.com
www.company.com sends content back to the client.
The issues come in with the data that www.anotherserver.com sends back to the client. Enter the world of relative and absolute paths.
Let's say that the actual request is www.company.com/widget:
Client hits www.company.com/widget
www.company.com requests www.anotherserver.com/widget
www.anotherserver.com/widget returns a page but on that page it has a link to www.anotherserver.com/widget/image.jpg
www.company.com returns the content back to the client but now the client has a link to www.anotherserver.com/widget/image.jpg
You will need to make sure that your backend servers use relative paths instead of absolute paths. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_(computing)
First I must explain I am a total newbie with regards to web design.
My question is as follows:
I would like to have a remote URL displayed through a different web server. The remote URL resides on an internal firewalled server and I would like to give public access to a single page by displaying it on a remote web server that has access to the firewalled page. I have tried iframes but they use the clients IP which results in the page failing to display. I have limited access to the server (CPanel) - please advise how this is possible? The remote URL will be requiring a login - not sure if this will have relevance on the solution.
What you can do is create a page which makes a request to the firewalled page using either CURL or HttpWebRequest or any compatible technology based on the platform you have chosen. It can then trim out the headers and other tags which are not required and render the html in a div, or it can just redirect the entire code in the response of your page.
This way, there will be no connection made from the client end, just your server will connect to your firewalled server and fetch the page from there and in turn give it back.
The only problem here is, forms - images and linked objects might not work properly, you might also have to parse them and replace the respective urls to point to your server which in turn proxyfy it.
Here is an example of it
https://proxify.net/