The web has made HTTP tremendously popular and is the de facto integration mechanism for accessing content on the internet. Interestingly, this technology was not hugely popular within applications that relied on native and binary protocols, such as RMI and CORBA for inter-application access.
When social consumer companies, such as Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Twitter, started publishing APIs to connect/integrate with their products, the de facto standard for integration across the web became HTTP/REST. Social consumer companies started investing in platforms for onboard developers to develop various applications leading to the proliferation of applications that relied on HTTP as the protocol.
The applications on the browser side are a mix of HTML and JavaScript. Information returned from the server or across other applications needs to...