02 The HTTP Protocol.md

The HTTP Protocol

In the lecture you learned about the HTTP protocol which is used to transfer information between web server and the web browser. Without this the World-Wide Web (WWW) would not exist. This lab will allow you to apply this knowledge and learn the details.

Setup

You will need to use the Chrome web browser for these exercises and have installed the ModHeader plugin.

Open the Chrome Developer Tools as shown below.

1 Request/Response

The HTTP protocol works on a request-response process, The client (typically the web browser) sends a request to the server which sends a response back to the client.

The request consists of three key parts:

1. The URL of the resource being requested.
2. The HTTP Method specifying the action to be taken.
3. A set of Request Headers to pass additional information.
4. Some methods (such as POST) also require a Request Body.

We will be working through some exercises that make use of all of these.

1. Start up the server script in the exercises/02_http/ directory. Refer the the previous lab if you get stuck at this point.
2. Using the server URL (see previous lab), access the root url /. This is the same activity that you carried out in the first worksheet and you should see the string hello world.
3. Locate the Network tab in the Chrome developer tools and in there you should see the resource sent in the HTTP response together with some data dealing with response times.
4. Click on the file name (as shown) to display the HTTP headers.

As you can see, the headers are displayed in a nice format. We need to see the source (the raw data). Locate the View Source links as shown and click to toggle how the data is displayed.

You can now see the raw data sent in the Request Headers and returned in the Response Headers.

In the Request Headers note that:

1. The first line specifies the HTTP method (GET) and the version of HTTP we are using (HTTP/1.1).
2. Next it specifies the host the request is being sent to.
3. Then there are multiple request headers. These are always key-value pairs. Lets look at a few of the more interesting ones:
   1. The User-Agent header sends information about the browser being used.
   2. The Accepts header tells the server what MIME data types our browser prefers.

In addition to the Response Body (the information in the web browser window), the server has returned a Status Code (in this case it is 200 meaning OK) plus a set of Response Headers that provide additional information.

1. The Content-Length header specifies the number of characters in the response (in this case 11).
2. The Date header is a string representing the date and time the response was sent.
3. The ETag header contains a hash of the contents and is used to see if the content has changed since the last request.

1.1 Test Your Knowledge

As part of the worksheets you will be given some exercises to carry out to make sure you fully understand the content covered.

1. Go to the University website and use the Chrome Developer Tools to examine the request and response headers.
   1. Are there any headers that were missing from the example above?
   2. Look up the meaning of all the headers.

2 Using the POST Method

Now we have a good understanding of the request-response process used by the HTTP protocol and have learned about the headers we will extend this by examining the use of the HTTP POST method.

1. Start by accessing the list of names on the /names url Make sure you have the Chrome Developer Tools open on the Network tab.:
   1. Notice the browser displays an error message.
   2. If you look at the HTTP Status Code you will see it is 404 Not Found which makes sense as there are no names in the list (yet)
2. Now access the form page on the /form URL. By default browsers use the GET method.
3. Input your name and use the submit button to add this data to the website. Examine the request and response headers:
   1. Notice that the Request Method has changed to POST.
   2. Notice that the Response Code is 201 Created to indicate that your data has been uploaded and stored.
   3. There is a section called Form Data which is the request body and contains the data you submitted using the form. Use the View Source link to display the raw data. This is how your data is sent to the server.
4. Use the back button to return to the form and use this to add the names of everyone else on your table.
5. Access the /names url which should now respond with the HTTP Status Code 200 OK and display your names in an HTML table.

3 Meta-Data

The path in the Uniform Resource Locator (URL) represents a resource on the server however sometimes you need to pass metadata to tell the server what you want it to do with this resource. There are two ways to pass metadata in an HTTP request, query strings and request headers. They differ in that anything in the URL is part of a book mark whilst the request headers are not. You need to decide whether this is important before deciding which to use.

3.1 Query Strings

Query strings are additional pieces of information attached to the URL and because of this it will be included in the bookmark. They are added as key-value pairs.

1. Still on the /names URL, add a search querystring, your URL will look like this: /names?search=xxx where the xxx represents the string fragment you are searching for.
   1. Try searching for a string fragment you know exists, what is the status code?
   2. Now search for a non-existent string fragment, what is the status code and why?
2. Add the page as a browser bookmark.
3. Retrieve the bookmark, notice that it includes the search query.

3.2 Request Headers

You have already seen the request headers that are sent automatically by the web browser however you can add your own to this. Let's start by replicating the search functionality by passing the search criteria as a request header.

1. Remove the query parameter from the URL so that all the names are displayed.
2. Open the Modify Headers plugin and add a custom header called search and sets its value to something you want to search for (see screenshot below).
3. Close the Modify Headers window and refresh the browser window, you should see the search is applied.
4. Bookmark this page.
5. Retrieve the bookmark, notice that the search is ignored.

You can also modify the standard request headers. In this example we will change the Accept header which defines the prefered format of the response data. The data formats are defined as MIME types The default settings look something like:

text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/webp,image/apng,*/*;q=0.8

This specified that the browser would prefer data in HTML/XML format (0.9 weighting) but will accept certain image formats and everything else. We will be changing this to request our data in specific formats.

1. Still on the /names URL, modify the request headers by removing and search terms.
2. Add a custom Accept header which will override the default and sets its value to text/html (see the screenshot below). If you refresh the browser you will see that the data is still displayed in an HTML table (because this format has been provided by the server).
3. Now try the following MIME types:
   1. application/json
   2. application/xml
   3. text/csv
4. Notice how in each case, the server is sending the same data but in a different format.
5. Finally lets try an unsupported MIME format, text/plain.
   1. Notice we get an error.
   2. We get an HTTP Status Code of 406 Not Acceptable.