Everyone seems to know that the web runs on HTTP, but what is HTTP all about?
HTTP stands for HyperText Transfer Protocol; an application-layer protocol that the web runs on. Implemented as a client-server model; HTTP defines how clients should make requests to servers and how servers should respond. It is a stateless protocol because servers do not maintain information about clients; runs on TCP and is probably the most widely known of the application-layer protocols.
Sample HTTP Client request
GET /index.html HTTP/1.1
The first line is the request line and the remaining lines are header lines.
The request line has three fields; the method – GET (some other methods include POST, PUT, DELETE and HEAD), the URL specifying the path to the desired file and the HTTP version being used by the client.
In the example, I made a GET request for the object at /index.html on the server using the HTTP version 1.1.
Headers
Host: openfirstsolutions.com
This identifies the host on which the object resides; although this might seem redundant, it is quite useful for caching.
Connection: close
This instructs the server to close the connection after sending back a response.
User-agent: Mozilla/4.0
This identifies the type of browser making the request.
Accept-Language: fr
Identifies the language preference of the client; do you now know why your browser always returns search results in Arabic or French. :)
Sample HTTP Server Response
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Sat, 11 Feb 2012 14:46:43 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.16 (Ubuntu)
Last-Modified: Sun, 11 Sep 2011 18:40:40 GMT
ETag: “42750-b1-4acaebf4ecb35”
Content-Length: 177
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html
<html><body><h1>It works!</h1>
<p>This is the default web page for this server.</p>
The web server software is running but no content has been added, yet
</body></html>
The sample response message has three sections: a status message, 7 header lines and then the entity body.
The status line states the HTTP version, the status code and the status message. Generally, HTTP response codes beginning with 2 indicate success, 3 indicate redirection (clients should automatically handle this), while those with 4 and 5 indicate errors.
The entity body contains the requested object.
Response Headers
Date: Sat, 11 Feb 2012 14:46:43 GMT
Indicates the time and date the server created the response.
Server: Apache/2.2.16 (Ubuntu)
Shows the server name and version (Apache/2.2.16) and the underlying host platform(Ubuntu).
Last-modified: Sun, 11 Sep 2011 18:40:40 GMT
The date and time the object was last modified; this is particularly useful to cache servers.
Content-Type:
Type of response; here it is an html file, it could also be application/json or application/xml.
E-Tag: “42750-b1-4acaebf4ecb35”
Entity Tag; This is used in caching; if the client wants to retrieve the same file again from the server, it uses the E-Tag as a check to verify if the file has changed on the server.
Content-length: 177
The number of bytes being sent in the response.
Connection: close
The TCP connection between the client and user is closed immediately after the transfer.
Enough talk, lets send an HTTP request to a server!
telnet url_of_some_web_server 80
Type the following exactly; you can add more headers from the Client request section above if you want to so wish:
GET /path-to-some-object-on-your-server HTTP/1.1
Host: url_of_some_web_server
Press Enter twice.
Do you see a response?
Do some more exploration and have fun with HTTP like I did.
CodeKraft 
Nice and brief.
Good it’s not for login to services.
Next tutorial -> SSH.
LikeLike
Thank you! :)
LikeLike