The Hypertext Transport Protocol (HTTP) is an application level protocol, which is lightweight and speedy enough to support different distributive, collaborative and hypermedia information system requirements. HTTP is a generic, stateless, object-oriented protocol approach to support tasks including name servers, and distributed object-oriented management systems, using HTTP request methods, which are commands used for data representation, allowing independent systems to build for data transfers.
Some well known HTTP request methods includes:
GET: a method used to request data from a specified source as it one of most common HTTP request methods. GET means to retrieve all the possible information via a Request-URI. This HTTP method can be in cache, in browser history, it can be bookmarked, it has length restrictions, and the sole purpose is to request data.
POST: a method used to send data to the server in order to create or update a resource and it is also one of most commonly used HTTP request methods. However this method can never be cache, and doesn't remain in browser history, it can’t be book marked however this request has no restrictions of data length.
PUT: this method sends data to the server to create or update a resource. The major difference between PUT and POST HTTP request methods is that PUT is an idempotent request method. Whereas, POST can be requested repeatedly with side effects of creating the same resources again several times.
HEAD: this method is identical to the GET request method but lacks any response body. HEAD request methods are used before the GET method to check the possibility of return values of GET requests. For example before downloading a large media file to our machine.
DELETE: this HTTP request method DELETE specific resources and requests that origin server delete the resources identified by Request-URI.
HTTP is the most basic format till date to use on Web and WWW later on. It is baseline and all other technology is based on this protocol. The HTTP request methods are helpful to achieve different client-server goals and helpful to maintain a synchronized information management over the web.
The HTTP request methods can be used by requesting using a GET method
GET /hello.htm HTTP/1.1
User-agent: Chrome
HOST: www.learningXYZ.com
Accept-Language: en-us
Accept-Encoding: Gzip, deflate
Connection: keep alive
Similarly, the POST method will respond will be turned in, it is used as follows
POST /cgi-bin/process.cgi HTTP/1.1
User-Agent: Chrome
Host: www.learningXYZ.com
Content-length: 88
Accept-language: en-us
Accept-encoding: gzip, deflate
Connection: keep-alive
Similarly the delete method will work like this:
DELETE hello.htm HTTP/1.1
User-Agent: Chrome
Host: www.learningXYZ.com
Accept-language: en-us
Connection: keep-alive
The PUT method will work like this way:
PUT hello.htm HTTP/1.1
User-Agent: Chrome
Host: www.learningXYZ.com
Content-length: 88
Accept-language: en-us
Content-type: text/html
Connection: keep-alive
Fielding, Roy, et al. "RFC2616: Hypertext Transfer Protocol--HTTP/1.1." (1999).
Jones, Michael, and Dick Hardt. The oauth 2.0 authorization framework: Bearer token usage. RFC 6750, October, 2012.