HTTP - HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP)

HTTP: Hypertext Transfer Protocol

The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is an application-level protocol with the lightness and speed necessary for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems. HTTP has been in use by the World-Wide Web global information initiative since 1990. HTTP allows an open-ended set of methods to be used to indicate the purpose of a request. Hypertext Transfer Protocol, which is more commonly to referred to as HTTP, builds on the discipline of reference provided by the Uniform Resource Identifier (URI), as a location (URL) or name (URN), for indicating the resource on which a method is to be applied. Messages are passed in a format similar to that used by Internet Mail and the Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME).

HTTP is also used as a generic protocol for communication between user agents and proxies/gateways to other Internet protocols, such as SMTP, NNTP, FTP, Gopher, and WAIS, allowing basic hypermedia access to resources available from diverse applications and simplifying the implementation of user agents.

The HTTP protocol is a request/response protocol. A client sends a request to the server in the form of a request method, URI, and protocol version, followed by a MIME-like message containing request modifiers, client information, and possible body content over a connection with a server with the implementation of HTTP and HTTP protocol. The server responds with a status line, including the message's HTTP protocol version and a success or error code, followed by a MIME-like message containing server information, entity meta information, and possible entity-body content.