HyperText Transfer
Protocol (HTTP)
Shweta Dubey
WHAT IS A PROTOCOL AND HTTP?
● Protocol: A Protocol is a standard procedure for defining and regulating
communication. For example TCP, UDP, HTTP etc.
● HTTP is the foundation of data communication for the World Wide Web.
● The HTTP is the Web’s application-layer protocol for transferring various
forms of data between server and client like plaintext, hypertext, image, videos
and sounds .
HTTP
Transfer protocol used throughout the WWW
● It is a request-response protocol
● It is stateless
● Runs on top of TCP on the standardized port 80
● The format of the request and response messages is dictated by HTTP
HOW HTTP WORKS?
● HTTP is implemented in two programs: a client program and a server
program, executing on different end systems, talk to each other by exchanging
HTTP messages.
● The HTTP client first initiates a TCP connection with the server. Once the
connection is established, the browser and the server processes access TCP
through their socket interfaces.
HTTP Request Message
Overall Structure:
Every HTTP request message has the same basic structure:
● Start line
● Header field(s) (one or more)
● Blank line
● Message body (optional)
Every start line consists of three parts, with a single space used to separate adjacent
parts:
● Request method
● Request-URI portion of web address
● HTTP version
Request-URI
The concatenation of the string http://, the value of the Host header field (domain
name), and the Request-URI forms a string known as a Uniform Resource Identifier.
HTTP/1.0 vs HTTP/1.1
In http 1.0, after the connection established, a single request sent over and a single
response sent back
● HTTP 1.1 support persistent connections
● Establish a TCP connection send a request and get a response
Request Method
HTTP Response Message
an HTTP response message consists of a status line, header fields, and the body of
the response, in the following format:
● Status line
● Header field(s) (one or more)
● Blank line
● Message body (optional)
● Every request gets a response consisting of a status line, and possibly
additional information.
● It contains a three-digit status code telling whether the request was satisfied,
and if not, why not
● first digit is used to divide the responses into five major groups
Some headers can be used in either direction
WEB CACHING
● Also called proxy server, is a network entity that satisfies HTTP requests on the
behalf of an origin Web server.
● The Web cache has its own disk storage and keeps copies of recently requested
objects in this storage.
● A Web cache can substantially reduce the response time for a client request,
particularly if the bandwidth between the client and the origin server is much
less than the bandwidth between the client and the cache.
● Web caches can substantially reduce traffic