Introducing the HTTP protocol
HTTP is an application layer protocol that defines the rules that clients, proxies, and servers need to follow for information exchange. It basically consists of two elements:
- A request made by the client, which requests from the server a specific resource specified by a URL.
- A response, sent by the server, that supplies the resource that the client requested.
The HTTP protocol is a stateless hypertext data transfer protocol that does not store the exchanged information between client and server. Being a stateless protocol for storing information related to an HTTP transaction, it is necessary to resort to other techniques for storing exchange data, such as cookies (values stored on the client side) or sessions (temporary memory spaces reserved to store information about one or more HTTP transactions on the server side).
The servers return an HTTP code indicating the outcome of an operation requested by the client. In addition, the...