Post By: Hanan Mannan
Contact Number: Pak (+92)-321-59-95-634
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HTTP - Messages
Contact Number: Pak (+92)-321-59-95-634
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HTTP - Messages
HTTP is based on client-server architecture model and a stateless request/response protocol that operates by exchanging messages across a reliable TCP/IP connection.
An HTTP "client" is a program (Web browser or any other client) that establishes a connection to a server for the purpose of sending one or more HTTP request messages. An HTTP "server" is a program ( generally a web server like Apache Web Server or Internet Information Services IIS etc. ) that accepts connections in order to serve HTTP requests by sending HTTP response messages.
HTTP makes use of the Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) to identify a given resource and to establish a connection. Once connection is established, HTTP messages are passed in a format similar to that used by Internet mail [RFC5322] and the Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) [RFC2045]. These messages are consisted of requests from client to server and responses from server to client which will have following format:
HTTP-message = <Request> | <Response> ; HTTP/1.1 messages
HTTP request and HTTP response use a generic message format of RFC 822 for transferring the required data. This generic message format consists of following four items.
- A Start-line
- Zero or more header fields followed by CRLF
- An empty line (i.e., a line with nothing preceding the CRLF) indicating the end of the header fields
- Optionally a message-body
Following section will explain each of the entities used in HTTP message.
Message Start-Line
A start-line will have following generic syntax:
start-line = Request-Line | Status-Line
We will discuss Request-Line and Status-Line while discussing HTTP Request and HTTP Response messages respectively. For now let's see the examples of start line in case of request and response:
GET /hello.htm HTTP/1.1 (This is Request-Line sent by the client)
HTTP/1.1 200 OK (This is Status-Line sent by the server)
Header Fields
HTTP header fields provide required information about the request or response, or about the object sent in the message body. There are following four types of HTTP message headers:
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General-header: These header fields have general applicability for both request and response messages.
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Request-header: These header fields are applicability only for request messages.
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Response-header: These header fields are applicability only for response messages.
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Entity-header: These header fields define metainformation about the entity-body or, if no body is present
All the above mentioned headers follow the same generic format and each of the header field consists of a name followed by a colon (:) and the field value as follows:
message-header = field-name ":" [ field-value ]
Following are the examples of various header fields:
User-Agent: curl/7.16.3 libcurl/7.16.3 OpenSSL/0.9.7l zlib/1.2.3
Host: www.example.com
Accept-Language: en, mi
Date: Mon, 27 Jul 2009 12:28:53 GMT
Server: Apache
Last-Modified: Wed, 22 Jul 2009 19:15:56 GMT
ETag: "34aa387-d-1568eb00"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 51
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Content-Type: text/plain
General-header: These header fields have general applicability for both request and response messages.
Request-header: These header fields are applicability only for request messages.
Response-header: These header fields are applicability only for response messages.
Entity-header: These header fields define metainformation about the entity-body or, if no body is present
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