HTTP:Another Acronym?
I can’t help it. When I see an acronym or just set of letters that I cannot decipher I get a little, ok more then a little anxious. Being an Air Force Veteran I was constantly looking at the foreign language of “Acronym” everyday often getting frustrated. But in this case it makes sense in my head because who really wants to spell out “Hypertext Transfer Protocol” before each url address?
Advice was given this week to try and picture these concepts as a real world example in order to make them more digestable. I will attempt this with a restaurant model. HTTP involves the client and server so We will say that the head chef is the server while the customers are the clients.
The initial transaction is called the request/response and deals with the client side sending information to the server in the form as a URL (Uniform Resource Locator). This URL is sent with a message with verbs (GET, POST, DELETE)that let the server know what it needs. Picture a customer sitting down in a restaurant and ordering a steak with a side salad. The steak itself would be the URL while letting the chef know how to cook it to order (rare, med-rare, medium, medium well, burnt) would be the detail of what kind of request to make.
After the server gets this information and processes it it will then return the information with a status code and message. This is a high level view of how this protocol works and knowing that HTTP forms the communication between the client and server is the basis.
Another important aspect of HTTP is that is is considered stateless. This essentially means that each transmittal is independent and has no connection with any other one. A good example is flipping a coin. The odds will always be the same and no flip has any outside connection to another.
Another version of HTTP is HTTPS which makes the protocol more secure by adding more layers. These layers are:
- TCP - Transport Layer Security
- SSL - Secure Sockets layer
There is a growing need in internet security nowadays and this is one way to help protect sensitive information for yourself and your clients/customers.
I think that is a good place to stop. The client and server will be communicating the information back and forth the next time you sit down in a nice restaurant and upload a pic of your medium rare steak!
