HTTP

Smriti Mishra
Dept. of Information Technology
Gaya College, Gaya
Paper IV Section B 1
 Overview
 Definition

 History

 HTTP 1.1 vs HTTP 1.0

 HTTP Messages
 Request Messages

 Response Messages

 Methods & Status Codes

 Headers
 Features

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 Tim Berner’s Lee is the inventor

 Networking Protocol

 Foundation of Data Communication of www

 Current Version is HTTP 2.0

 It functions as request – response protocol

 Default Port is 80

 Underlying Protocol: TCP

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 Application Layer, Request Response protocol
Server Response: The server reads
 Basic Function & interprets the request . It takes
Client Requests: HTTP client sends action relevant to the request &
a Request message formatted creates an HTTP response
according to the rules of the HTTP message, which it sends back to the
standard – an HTTP Request. This client. Response message indicates
message specifies the resource that whether the request was successful
client wishes to retrieve or includes & may also contain the content of
information to be provided to the the resource that the client
server . requested , if appropriate.

Request

Response

HTTP Client Smriti Mishra (Dept. Of IT, Gaya College) HTTP Server 4
 Client Server

• Why TCP ?
TCP split Handshake

Session Established

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 Multiple Host support
 Persistence Connections
 Byte Range Request
 Caching and Proxy Support
 More HTTP Methods

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 HTTP/1.1 allows an HTTP client and server to set up a
persistence connection. The TCP connection is kept open
after each request/response set, so that next
request/response can be exchanged immediately.

 The session is only closed when the client is done requesting

all documents it needs.

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 Request Messages

 Response Messages

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 All communication takes place via HTTP
messages – Request and Response
 Text based
 Message Format
<start line>
<message-headers>
<empty-line>
<message-body>

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<start line>
<message-headers>
<empty-line>
[<message-body>]

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<status line>
<response-headers>
<empty-line>
[<message-body>]

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 Series of commands – for the client to
prompt the server to take action
 Always in upper case
 Most common types
 GET
 HEAD
 POST

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 Other less common methods
 OPTIONS
 PUT
 UPDATE
 DELETE
 TRACE
 GET, HEAD, TRACE – Safe methods

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 HTTP Status lines contain both a numeric
status code and a text reason phrase

TTP/1.1 200 ok Status line

Status Code Reason Phrase

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 The general form of an HTTP status code is
“xyy” , where the first digit “x” is specified as
Status Code Format Meaning
1yy Informational Message
2yy Success
3yy Redirection
4yy Client Error
5yy Server Error

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 Browser Plug-ins
 Live HTTP Headers

 HTTP Fox

 Browser Developer Tools

 Proxy Tools
 Fiddler

 Charles

 Burp

 Wireshark and many more

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 Used in Request Message
 Allow client to provide information about itself to the server
 Give details about the nature of requests
 Allow the client to have greater control over how its request is processed
and how (even if) a response is returned by the server.
 Examples
 Accept/ Accept-charset/Accept-Encoding/Accept-language
 Authorization
 Expect
 From
 Host- the only mandatory header
 Max- forwards
 Proxy- Authorization etc.

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 Appear only in HTTP responses
 Provide additional that expands upon the summary information that is
present in the status line at the beginning of each server reply.
 Examples
 Accept-ranges
 Age
 Etag( specifies entity tag)
 Location (using 3xx/201 status codes)
 Proxy-Authenticate
 Retry-After
 Server
 Vary
 WWW Authenticate(401)

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 Caching
 Cookies
 Pipelining

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 The storing of recently-requested resources in a
temporary area
 Advantages:
 Reduced bandwidth used – by eliminating unneeded
tranfers of requests & responses
 Faster Response Time for the user loading a resource

 Can be implementing in various places:

▪ Web Client Caching
▪ Intermediary Caching
▪ Web Server Caching

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 HTTP uses encrypted data for exchange of
communication between Client & Server.

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