Jan K. Labanowski: "Tomcat, servlets, JSPs and other friends"

HTTP

Hyper Text Transport Protocol

There are several request types in the HTTP protocol:
  • GET -- request for a resource (resource may be a file or a program/scrip) and passes parameters to the resource via URI (iniform resource identifier) itself. For example: http://www.ccl.net/cgi-bin/getme?name=Jan&sex=mail The most popular form of GET is when there is no parameters following the file specification, e.g.: http://www.ccl.net/index.html, which is usually when you request a static page.
  • POST -- request for a dynamic resource for which parameters are passed in the body of the request.
  • HEAD -- request for information about the resource (only header returned, without actual body).
  • PUT -- request to put a file on the web server. Used in applications which allow remote Web server configuration and maintainance.