Hypertext Transfer Protocol , or HTTP, is the protocol used within the World Wide Web for transferring documents. Its latest version is 1.1. HTTP/2, an incompatible binary protocol, is designed to be its successor.
HTTP was preceded by Tuplespace, which is data-centric rather than resource-centric, and provides an even smaller set of verbs.
EMJ 2015-11-13 : Is someone claiming an actual connection here? If not, why mention one particular idea among many about how to share data across a network?
PYK 2015-11-13: Thanks for the heads-up. I had inadvertantly placed this note on the HTML page, and have now moved it over to this page. HTTP must have been inspired by tuplespace, which is an earlier invention of a restricted set of verbs that is sufficient for the purpose distributing data among peers. HTTP is very similar, with only a few more verbs and a switch in focus from data to resources. People considering an HTTP-based architecture like REST might be interested in considering tuplespace as an alternative. Tuplespace is more transactional. It provides an atomic pop operation, while HTTP doesn't. I find it interesting that REST in some ways is an attempt at retrofitting HTTP to be more like Tuplespace, somewhat like Javascript has managed to retrofit HTML to be more of a traditional desktop user interface system. HTTP and HTML were designed for a rather narrow purpose, and because of their wild success have ended up evolving back toward systems the predate them.
(The Docker client implementation includes an implementation of the minimal subset of HTTP necessary for the very purpose of talking to the Docker daemon. It has the particularity (over http) to support chunked encoding, and I wish I had known about rl_http before! Note that the implementation is also able to perform HTTP protocol operation on top of any file descriptor, since it uses pipes to netcat or nc to talk to local Docker daemons (UNIX domain sockets). EF)
PYK 2016-04-13: When forming an HTTP request in Tcl, make sure lines end in CRLF. Otherwise, the reponse may be 400 Bad Request. The MIME module in Tcllib produces messages with CRLF as the line delimiter, in which case the channel should be configured as -translation binary.