【二】XJCO3011 Web Services and Web Data (HTTP-The Workhorse of the Web)

The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) The Multimedia Courier of the Web

Every day, billions of multimedia content (e.g. JPEG images, HTML pages, text files, MPEG movies, WAV audio files, Java applets) cruise through the Internet using the HTTP protocol

HTTP moves information quickly and reliably from web servers all around the world to web browsers on people’s desktops.

HTTP is an application layer protocol that dates back to 1991, but is still the workhorse of the world wide web.

A good understanding of this protocol is essential for building web applications, search engines, and RESTful APIs.

 A Quick Introduction to the HTTP Protocol

•  A protocol is a set of rules and standards that govern the communication between two or more devices or systems, typically in the context of computer networking
• HTTP is a protocol used to transfer resources over the web, and it forms the basis of web resources.
• Web resources are various types of files, documents, images, videos, audios, and other files that are transmitted from a web server to a client browser using the HTTP protocol
• Therefore, HTTP and web resources are closely related, with HTTP providing a standard way to transfer web resources so that they can be accessed, shared, and utilized on the web

Web Resources

• Web servers host web resources.
• A web resource is the source of web content.
• The simplest kind of web resource is a static file on the web server’s filesystem (text, HTML, Microsoft Word, Adobe Acrobat, JPEG image, AVI movie, .. etc.)
• However, resources do NOT have to be static files. Resources can also be software programs that generate content on demand

URIs

The HTTP protocol defines the rules and format of communication between a client browser and a server, allowing the client browser to request web resources and receive them.

Web resources are typically identified by a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI), and the client browser uses the URI to send an HTTP request to the server, which responds by returning the appropriate web resource.

 Each web resource has a name, so clients can point out what resources they are interested in. •

The resource name is called a uniform resource identifier, or URI.

URIs have the general form: “scheme://server location/path”

 HTTP uses a Client Server Model

 HTTP Message Types

All HTTP messages fall into two types: request messages and response messages.

Request messages request an action from a web server.

Response messages carry results of a request back to a client.

Both request and response messages have the same basic message structure

 HTTP Message: General Format

 The Parts of an HTTP Message

 A start line describing the message.

A block of headers containing some attributes.

An optional body containing data.

Each line ends with a two-character end-of-line sequence, consisting of a carriage return (ASCII 13) and a line-feed character (ASCII 10), called CRLF (or \r\n in C like languages)

 Format of a Request Message

 Format of a Response Message

 Status Code Classes

 The Header Lines

Each HTTP header has a simple syntax: a name, followed by a colon (:), followed by the field value, followed by a CRLF

 Header Types

General headers used by both clients and servers. For example, the Date header: Date: Tue, 3 Oct 1974 02:16:00 GMT

Request headers specific to request messages. They provide extra information to servers, such as what type of data the client is willing to receive. For example, to accept any media type we use: Accept: */*

Response headers provide information to the client. For example, to tell the client that it is talking to a Version 1.0 Tiki-Hut server: Server: Tiki-Hut/1.0

Entity headers refer to headers that deal with the entity body. For example, the following Content-Type header lets the application know that the data is an HTML document in the iso-latin-1 character set: Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-latin-1

Media Types

• In HTTP, Media types are used to indicate the type of content being transferred in the body of an HTTP message. In the HTTP protocol, when a client makes a request to a server, the server responds with an HTTP message that contains a response body, which can be any type of data, such as HTML documents, images, audio, video, and so on. Media types are used to identify these different types of data.
• The use of media types in HTTP provides a standardized way to represent data types, which allows different clients and servers to interact with each other. This standardization ensures that data is correctly parsed and processed, ensuring the reliability and interoperability of data transfer.
• Additionally, media types can guide web browsers in displaying different content types, such as rendering HTML files as web pages and PDF files as documents.
• In HTTP, each response message includes a "Content-Type" header field, which specifies the media type of the response message body.
• The Content-Type field value is made up of a MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) type and an optional MIME subtype, such as "text/html" or "image/jpeg". The client uses the Content-Type field value to determine how to handle the data in the response message body.
• MIME was originally designed for moving messages between different electronic mail systems. MIME worked very well, so HTTP adopted it to describe and label its own multimedia content.

MIME types structure 

Each MIME media type consists of a primary type, a subtype, and a list of optional parameters.

The type and subtype are separated by a slash, and the optional parameters begin with a semicolon.

The primary type can be a predefined type, an IETF-defined (Internet Engineering Task Force) extension token, or an experimental token (beginning with “x-”). Here are a few examples:

 MIME type examples:

An HTML-formatted text document would be text/html.

A plain ASCII text document would be text/plain.

A JPEG version of an image would be image/jpeg.

An Apple QuickTime movie would be video/quicktime.

A Microsoft PowerPoint presentation would be application/vnd.ms-powerpoint.

 A GIF-format image would be image/gif.

MIME Type IANA Registration

MIME types should be registered with IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority )

Registration is simple and open to all.

MIME type tokens are split into four classes, called “registration trees,” each with its own registration rules.

 Common HTTP Methods (verbs)

 Note that not all methods are implemented by every server. To be compliant with HTTP Version 1.1, a server need implement only the GET and HEAD methods for its resources

GET

GET is the most common method. It usually is used to ask a server to send a resource

 HEAD

• The HEAD method behaves exactly like the GET method, but the server returns only the headers in the response. No entity body is ever returned.
• This allows a client to inspect the headers for a resource without having to actually get the resource.
• Using HEAD, you can:
  • ‾ Find out about a resource (e.g., determine its type) without getting it.
  • ‾ See if an object exists, by looking at the status code of the response.
  • ‾ Test if the resource has been modified, by looking at the headers (Last-Modified)

PUT

The PUT method writes documents to a server, in the inverse of the way that GET reads documents from a server.

Some publishing systems let you create web pages and install them directly on a web server using PUT

 POST

The POST method sends input data to the server.

For example, it is often used to support HTML forms. The data from a filled-in form is sent to the server, which then processes it.

 TRACE

• When a client makes a request, that request may have to travel through firewalls, proxies, gateways, or other applications.
• Each of these has the opportunity to modify the original HTTP request.
• The TRACE method allows clients to see how its request looks when it finally makes it to the server
• A TRACE request initiates a “loopback” diagnostic at the destination server.
• The server at the final leg of the trip bounces back a TRACE response, with the virgin request message it received in the body of its response

 OPTIONS

The OPTIONS method asks the server to tell us about the various supported capabilities of the web server.

You can ask a server about what methods it supports in general or for particular resources (Some servers may support particular operations only on particular kinds of objects).

This provides a means for client applications to determine how best to access various resources without actually having to access them

 DELETE

The DELETE method asks the server to delete the resources specified by the request URL.

However, the client application is not guaranteed that the delete is carried out.

The HTTP specification allows the server to override the request without telling the client.

 Extension Methods

HTTP was designed to be field-extensible, so new features wouldn’t cause older software to fail.

Extension methods are methods that are not defined in the HTTP/1.1 specification.

They provide developers with a means of extending the capabilities of the HTTP services their servers implement on the resources that the servers manage.

Example: the WebDAV HTTP extension that support publishing of web content to web servers over HTTP