HTTP-Hyper Text Tansfer Protocol

By,
Praveen

The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is stateless protocol. It is  an application protocol that use  for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems.
HTTP is used in the World Wide Web, and it is the foundation of data communication
Hypertext is the structured text. It uses logical links (hyperlinks) between nodes that contains text.
HTTP is the protocol that use logical links to exchange or transfer hypertext.

Development of HTTP was done by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in 1989. Standards development of HTTP was done by the W3C and the IETF. The first version of HTTP was HTTP/1.1.

HTTP protocol working as a request - response protocol in the client - server computing model. A web browser may be working as client  and an application running on a computer hosting a web site may be working as the server. The client submits an HTTP request message through web browser to the server. The server responds to clients, which provides resources such as HTML files, documents and other content, or performs other functions on behalf of the client, send  a response message to the client’s web browser. The response contains completion status information about the request and also contains requested content in its message body.

HTTP Methods

GET:
The GET method requests a server to representation of the specified resource in client side. Requests using GET by web browser should only retrieve data and should have no other effect.

POST:
The Post Method is used for requesting to the server accepts the entity enclosed in the request as a new subordinate of the web resource identified by the URI. The data Posted might be, for example, an annotation for existing resources; a message for a bulletin board, newsgroup, mailing list, or comment thread; a block of data that is the result of submitting a web form to a data-handling process; or an item to add to a database.

 

HEAD:
The HEAD method using for asks for a response identical to that of a GET request, but it has no response body. This is useful for retrieve the meta-information written in response headers, without having to transport the entire content.

OPTIONS:

The OPTIONS method is using for returns the HTTP methods that the server supports for the specified URL. That be used to check the functionality of a web server by request made  '*' instead of a specific resource.

PUT:
The PUT method is used for requests that the enclosed entity be stored under the supplied URI. It is modified, If the URI refers to an already existing resource. If the URI does not point to an existing resource, then the server can create the resource with that URI

DELETE:
The DELETE method used for delete a specified resource.

TRACE:
The TRACE method using for echoes the received request so that a client can see the status that what changes or additions have been made by intermediate servers.

CONNECT:
The CONNECT method is using to converts the request connection to a transparent TCP/IP tunnel, usually used to facilitated SSL encrypted communications (HTTPS) through an unencrypted HTTP proxy.

PATCH:
The PATCH method is using to applies partial modifications to a resource