How HTTP Works
Explore the fundamentals of HTTP communication including the request/response model, start lines, headers, and bodies. Understand how standardized and custom headers work to support secure and efficient web app communication.
We'll cover the following...
As we’ve seen before, HTTP follows a request/response model where a client connected to the server issues a request and the server replies back to it.
An HTTP message (either a request or a response) contains multiple parts:
- start line
- headers
- body
HTTP requests
In a request, the start line indicates the verb used by the client, the path of the resource it wants, and the version of the protocol it is going to use.
GET /players/lebron-james HTTP/1.1
In this case, the client is trying to GET the resource at /players/lebron-james through version 1.1 of the protocol. This shouldn’t be nothing hard to understand.
Headers
After the start line, HTTP allows us to add metadata to the message through headers which take the form of key-value pairs separated by a colon.
GET /players/lebron-james HTTP/1.1
Host: nba.com
Accept: */*
Coolness: 9000
In this request, for example, the ...