HTTP: Digested

We're web developers. Almost all the work we do concerns making requests and sending responses over the Web. Yet, how often do we really stop to consider the Web's protocol as part of our daily work? Still, we manipulate that protocol every day, whether we know it or not. Knowing this protocol and how it works can make us better web programmers.

Hypertext Transfer Protocol (RFC 2616), or HTTP, is the protocol of the Web. In this in-depth tutorial, Ben Ramsey will address methods and status codes, success responses, error responses, redirection, content negotiation, caching, and authentication, all with an emphasis on following HTTP semantics in a RESTful fashion. Ben will also demonstrate tools for manipulating and testing HTTP, illustrate the use of the pecl/pecl_http extension for PHP, and discuss browser support for HTTP functionality.