HTTP

Abstract

The Hypertext Transfer Protocol, or HTTP, drives the Web. HTTP is a stateless, text-based protocol that works on top of TCP. An encrypted version of HTTP, named HTTP Secure, or HTTPS, is also commonly used when dealing with sensitive data. HTTP is a request-response protocol that is implemented using the client-server programming model discussed in Chapter 10. Traditionally, a browser is used as the client in an HTTP transaction, but you’ll see that this is not always the case. When a browser navigates to a given URL, an HTTP request is made to the server that hosts the URL. As you learned in Chapter 10, this request is normally made on TCP port 80 (or 443 if HTTPS is in use). The server processes the request and then responds to the client. This is how HTTP works at a very high level. This chapter takes a deeper dive into HTTP in the Node.js world.