Chapter 4: Ingesting HTTP Data

The next building block in application development involves data. Without data, the web has little utility. I do not mean to get too philosophical here, but it is axiomatic that the purpose of the internet is the facilitation of the transfer of data and knowledge from one location to another. Therefore, it is critical to our development as web professionals to learn how data can be transferred not just from our applications (which we deal with in Chapter 5, Building Response Handlers), but also to our applications (which is the purpose of this chapter). The simplest applications we can build simply provide data. However, to become interactive web applications participating in the global exchange of knowledge, even simple applications must be capable of extracting data from web requests.

A web application that receives no data is like a screencast. Viewers can come to watch the presentation, but the presenter has no personal connection to the people...