Sending a Request to a Server

When you want to retrieve data from a web server, you send a GET request to the server. When sending a request, the URL will contain the information on the resource you want data from. The URL can be broken down into a few key parts. These include the protocol, the hostname, the URI, and the query parameters. The format of it looks like this:

Figure 14.1: URL format breakdown

In this example:

• The Protocol tells the client how to connect to the server. The two most common protocols are HTTP and HTTPS. In this example, we have used https.
• The Hostname is the address of the server we want to connect to. In this example, it is example.com.
• The URI is the Uniform Resource Identifier (URI), and this tells the server the path to the resource we want. In this example, it is /downloads.
• The Query Parameters tell the server of any additional information it needs. In this example, we have two parameters. These are filter...