HTTP

Hypertext Transfer Protocol

23-Aug-12

HTTP messages

HTTP is the language that web clients and web servers use to talk to each other

HTTP is largely under the hood, but a basic understanding can be helpful

Each message, whether a request or a response, has three parts:

1. The request or the response line 2. A header section 3. The body of the message

What the client does, part I

The client sends a message to the server at a particular port (80 is the default) The first part of the message is the request line, containing:

A method (HTTP command) such as GET or POST

A document address, and An HTTP version number

GET /index.html HTTP/1.0

Example:

Other methods

Other methods beside GET and POST are:

HEAD: Like GET, but ask that only a header be returned PUT: Request to store the entity-body at the URI DELETE: Request removal of data at the URI LINK: Request header information be associated with a document on the server UNLINK: Request to undo a LINK request OPTIONS: Request information about communications options on the server TRACE: Request that the entity-body be returned as received (used for debugging)
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What the client does, part II

The second part of a request is optional header information, such as:

What the client software is What formats it can accept

All information is in the form Name: Value Example:

User-Agent: Mozilla/2.02Gold (WinNT; I) Accept: image/gif, image/jpeg, */*

A blank line ends the header

Client request headers

Accept: type/subtype, type/subtype, ...

Specifies media types that the client prefers to accept Preferred language (For example: English, French, German) The browser or other client program sending the request Email address of user of client program Information about a cookie for that URL Multiple cookies can be separated by commas

Accept-Language: en, fr, de

User-Agent: string

From: dave@acm.org

Cookie: name=value

What the client does, part III

The third part of a request (after the blank line) is the entity-body, which contains optional data

The entity-body part is used mostly by POST requests The entity-body part is always empty for a GET request

What the server does, part I

The server response is also in three parts The first part is the status line, which tells:

The HTTP version A status code A short description of what the status code means

Example: HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found Status codes are in groups:

100-199 200-299 300-399 400-499 500-599 Informational The request was successful The request was redirected The request failed A server error occurred
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Common status codes

200 OK

Everything worked, heres the data URI was moved, but heres the new address for your records URL temporarily out of service, keep the old one but use this one for now There is a xyntax error in your request You cant do this, and we wont tell you why No such document Request took too long to fulfill for some reason
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301 Moved Permanently

302 Moved temporarily

400 Bad Request

403 Forbidden

404 Not Found

408 Request Time-out, 504 Gateway Time-out

What the server does, part II

The second part of the response is header information, ended by a blank line Example:

Content-Length: 2532 Connection: Close Server: GWS/2.0 Date: Sun, 01 Dec 2002 21:24:50 GMT Content-Type: text/html Cache-control: private Set-Cookie: PREF=ID=05302a93093ec661:TM=1038777890:LM=1038777890:S= All on one line yNWNjraftUz299RH; expires=Sun, 17-Jan-2038 19:14:07 GMT; path=/; domain=.google.com

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Viewing the response

There is a header viewer at http://www.delorie.com/web/headers.html (with nasty jittery advertisements) Example 2.3 (GetResponses) in the Gittleman book does the same thing Heres an example (from GetResponses):
% java GetResponses http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~matuszek/cit5972003/index.html Status line: HTTP/1.1 200 OK Response headers: Date: Wed, 10 Sep 2003 00:26:53 GMT Server: Apache/1.3.26 (Unix) PHP/4.2.2 mod_perl/1.27 mod_ssl/2.8.10 OpenSSL/0.9.6e Last-Modified: Tue, 09 Sep 2003 19:24:50 GMT ETag: "1c1ad5-1654-3f5e2902 Accept-Ranges: bytes Content-Length: 5716 Keep-Alive: timeout=15, max=100 Connection: Keep-Alive Content-Type: text/html
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The GetResponses program, I

Heres just the skeleton of the program that provided the output on the last slide: import java.net.*; import java.io.*; public class GetResponses { public static void main(String [ ] args) { try { ...interesting code goes here... } catch(Exception e) { e.printStackTrace(); } } }
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The GetResponses program, II

Heres the interesting part of the code:

URL url = new URL(args[0]); URLConnection c = url.openConnection(); System.out.println("Status line: "); System.out.println('\t' + c.getHeaderField(0)); System.out.println("Response headers:"); String value = ""; int n = 1; while (true){ value = c.getHeaderField(n); if (value == null) break; System.out.println('\t' + c.getHeaderFieldKey(n++) + ": " + value); }
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Server response headers

Server: NCSA/1.3

Name and version of the server Should be of a type and subtype specified by the clients Accept header Requests the client to store a cookie with the given name and value

Content-Type: type/subtype

Set-Cookie: name=value; options

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What the server does, part III

The third part of a server response is the entity body This is often an HTML page

But it can also be a jpeg, a gif, plain text, etc.--anything the browser (or other client) is prepared to accept

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The <meta http-equiv> tag

The <meta http-equiv=string content=string> tag may occur in the <head> of an HTML document http-equiv and content typically have the same kinds of values as in the HTTP header This tag asks the client to pretend that the information actually occurred in the header

The information is not really in the header As usual, not all browsers handle this information the same way

Example:
<meta http-equiv="Set-Cookie" content="value=n;expires=date; path=url">

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Summary

HTTP is a fairly straightforward protocol with a lot of possible kinds of predefined header information

More kinds can be added, so long as client and server agree 1. A header line 2. A block of header information, ending with a blank line 3. The (optional) entity body, containing data

A request from the client consists of three parts:

A response from the server consists of the same three parts HTTP headers are under the hood information, not normally displayed to the user As with most of the things covered in CIT597,

We have covered only the fundamentals Much more detail can be found on the Web
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The End

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