HTTP Topics
All things HTTP.
The main thrust of this section is to provide the reader with the necessary tools to fully implement all of the performance and function enhancing capabilities of the HTTP 1.1 specification. The specification is very broad and covers many aspects of HTTP, including interaction with TCP on the transport side, and interaction with servers and clients on the application side.
HTTP 1.1 was inroduced to fix many of the problems with 1.0, and it has suceeded very well. To fully utilize these tools, one must be very proficient with the protocol - gone are the days of throwing together a static HTML page and slapping it on a server. That will still work, but your sites will lack functionality, performance and a rich environment for the end-users.
If you are writing complex server-side scripts, knowing HTTP will prove to be invaluable to you. For example, if you decide to create a server-side chatroom, you will need to implement cookies, sessions (which are really just memory-resident cookies), cache control, etc. You will need to intimately know how the HTTP transactions are taking place in order to put something like this together.
This site aims to provide one location for all of this information, so you don't have to keep searching multitudes of sites, unrelated topics, and non-applicable coding examples. Now, we just need a little time to put all of the information together.
For a very good overview on web communications as it relates to maintaining session state, you might want to take a look at this article, maintaining session state on the web. There are also many other very good articles, tutorials and code snippets on the Zend website, aimed primarily at the PHP crowd.
Here are a few of the topics that will be covered in upcoming articles and tutorials.
- Basics of the HTTP protocol and how it is implemented.
- HTTP Headers, how they work, the different types, and how to manipulate them.
- Code snippets and programming methodologies for PHP, ASP and other web developement languages.
- In-depth information of the HTTP 1.1 implementation, including:
- Differences between HTTP 1.0 and 1.1
- Persistent connections, TCP and performance
- Content-type encoding specifications
- Transfer-type specifications - chunking, compression, etc.
- Post and Put mthods
- Many programming issues:
- Server, client and proxy cache control and how to implemnt it in your dynamic content
- Using compression tecniques
- Apache transparent compression
- Writing your own PHP script to do the compression
- The compression methods implemented in HTTP 1.1
- Content buffering and headers
- URL rewriting in Apache
- HTTP Authentication