Clients and making requests

When a client issues requests to the server and the downstream application, we might potentially have a major design problem: how do we know in advance what kind of requests we might receive? If we had to re-implement a new set of standard requests every time we developed a web application, it would be difficult to reuse code and write generic services that other programs could call, since their requests would potentially have to change for every web application a client might interact with.

This is the problem solved by the HTTP standard, which describes a standard language and format in which requests are sent between servers and clients, allowing us to rely upon a common command syntax, which could be consumed by many different applications. While we could, in theory, issue some of these commands to our prediction service by pasting a URL into the address bar of our browser (such as GET, described below), this will only cover a subset of the kinds of requests...