The Client-Server Model: What Happens When You Visit a Website
~11 min read
A client asks for something; a server provides it. Your browser is a client, the website's machine is a server — nearly every AI app you'll build follows this exact same two-role split.
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Key points
- •A client initiates requests (browser, mobile app, API-calling script); a server waits for and responds to them — the same request/response roles from api-basics, now about machines
- •Typically many clients connect to far fewer servers, which is why servers are usually powerful always-on machines while clients can be anything
- •Visiting a website: DNS lookup finds the server's address, the browser (client) sends a request, the server does the work and sends back a response to render
- •'Frontend' and 'backend' are the web-development near-synonyms for client-side and server-side code respectively
- •AI apps follow the same split: your frontend is what the user interacts with; your backend is a separate program that actually calls the LLM API