Getting streaming data

The term streaming has become somewhat of a buzzword. Many people, even outside the tech industry, use it all the time. The word—and, more specifically, the actual technological concept that it represents—has become an important part of society as the consumption of media content continues its march to the cloud. What exactly is streaming? For those who are not entirely clear about what this term means, we will spend a brief moment attempting to understand it before moving on.

Streaming is the act of sending data in multiple, consecutive chunks from one side of an open connection to the other. One of the core foundations of the HTTP model is that there is a request followed by a response after a connection has been established between the client and the server. The client sends a complete HTTP request message and then waits for the server to send back a complete HTTP response message. It looks like this:

Figure 4.1...