The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is an application-level protocol for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems. This is the foundation for data communication for the World Wide Web (i.e. internet) since 1990. HTTP is a generic and stateless protocol which can be used for other purposes as well using extensions of its request methods, error codes, and headers.

This tutorial is based on RFC-2616 specification, which defines the protocol referred to as HTTP/1.1. HTTP/1.1 is a revision of the original HTTP (HTTP/1.0). A major difference between HTTP/1.0 and HTTP/1.1 is that HTTP/1.0 uses a new connection for each request/response exchange, where as HTTP/1.1 connection may be used for one or more request/response exchanges.

Audience

This tutorial has been prepared for computer science graduates and web developers to help them understand the basic to advanced level concepts related to Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP).

Prerequisites

Before proceeding with this tutorial, it is good to have a basic understanding of web concepts, web browsers, web servers, client and server architecture based software.