HTTP stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol. It's a stateless, application-layer protocol for communicating between distributed systems, and is the foundation of the modern web. As a web developer, we all must have a strong understanding of this protocol. Let's review this powerful protocol through the lens of a web developer. We'll tackle the topic in two parts. In this first entry, we'll cover the basics and outline the various request and response headers.

They cover some of the basics of the protocol first including its statelessness, the concept of URLs and the HTTP "verbs" (like GET, POST and DELETE). They also briefly cover the HTTP response codes (ex. 200, 304) and the flow of the request and response to and from the web server. They also look at some of the basic HTTP headers and the actual low-level text formats of the requests/responses.

There's a section at the end of the post that links you to a few tools that you can use to view the HTTP messaging happening in your requests, some of which you might already have. They also briefly cover the use of HTTP in a few libraries - ExpressJS, Ruby on Rails and jQuery's Ajax handling.

This tutorial will show you how to add jQuery RESTful calls for using the DELETE verb when deleting items via a JSON REST interface.

You'll definitely need to check out either the previous tutorials in the series to follow along with the code or grab the current source to see how everything's structured.

While PHP is capable of performing HTTP requests towards external servers with any method, either via the HTTP extension or by opening streams directly, the support of the various GET, POST, PUT and other verbs on the receiving side of HTTP requests is a bit more complicated.

He notes that the "more interesting" ones are defined in the HTTP 1.1 spec and, unfortunately, those are ones not natively supported by PHP (like POST and GET are). He recommends a workaround for the problem so you can still work with data that clients PUT or DELETE - using a fopen call to the "php://input" stream on the connection and pulling in the raw data. Not idea, but definitely functional.

In my regular web wanderings recently, I found a great post entitled "The 7 Worst Verbs Programmers Use In Function Calls" and couldn't help but be reminded of a system that I worked on a few years ago. The core function of the system was named - no kidding - "doStuff". Everything in the application led towards that, used it, and then did other things as a result.

He suggests a structure he uses - "verbAjectiveNounStructure". Starting with an action, moving to a description of the action, to the target of the action and finally an optional structure - how the returned data is formatted.