What is HTTP?

Let's go to a restaurant first before we begin today's discussion. When you go to a restaurant and place an order to the waiter for food, the waiter takes the order to the chef. The chef then prepares the food, and the waiter brings it to you when it is ready. You then take the food.

We already know that HTTP is the primary method used by computers to communicate between themselves. In this sense, HTTP may be compared to a waiter. It is good to say that every clients and servers are computers.

Now we go back to the restaurant again. In this case, you are the website's client, the waiter is HTTP, and the server is the chef. Every action we perform, like logging in, liking, commenting, or searching a website, is sent to the server as a Request, and the server then responds based on it. The HTTP performs like a waiter on a website by taking requests from clients to servers and delivering responses from servers to clients. This model is known as the Request Response Model.

A system is needed to transmit data between client and server, you can assume that HTTP is that system. HTTP stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol. That is, HTTP is a protocol that transfers data between the client and the server. If you work only with the server side or only the client side, then you don't need HTTP, but if you work with both the server side and the client side, and the client has to communicate with the server, then HTTP is required. Because the only medium is HTTP for communication between the server and the client. Certain techniques or verbs, often known as HTTP Methods or HTTP Verbs, are used by HTTP to transfer data. When we send an HTTP Request, it transmits data from the Client or Browser to the server through the HTTP Header. Previously XML format was used more to transmit data to Server and Client but currently, JSON format is the most popular so we need to have a clear understanding of JSON format.

You will currently see, any website's URL starts with http:// or https://. HTTP and HTTPS are almost the same, only there are some differences between them. The most popular protocol at the moment is HTTPS.

Click here to learn the differences between HTTP and HTTPS.