CST311 - Module 2

What did I learn in the second week of CST311? 

This week we explored the application layer of the internet protocol stack. Basically, it focused on how applications are built and interact with each other, which began by outlining the principles of network applications and emphasized that developers writing programs to communicated over the network don't need to modify the core network devices. Furthermore, the module explored common network applications such as email, web browsing, streaming, and peer-to-peer, which highlighted the roles and their purpose within an applications design. Therefore, explaining key protocols like HTTP and DNS, while revisiting the layered protocol model. In the end, this module mostly covered topics from the previous model as this one in particular was combined with last week's module due to a programming assignment.

The programming assignment was over a UDP Pinger using VirtualBox to implement the core functionality of the assignment, which took up an entire week from September 16 - 23 to finalize. Basically, we needed to implement a UDP-based client-server application through python3, which needed to be measured in round-trip time for each packet and handled for potential packet loss. Furthermore, this assignment emphasized that we should understand how to do connectionless communication, timeout handling, and basic socket programming in python.