
Application Layer Protocols 265
Further, HTTP is similar to SMTP because in both protocols, the client initiates a request and the
server responds to that particular request. However, HTTP messages can only be read by HTTP server
and HTTP client, whereas in SMTP, messages can be read by humans also. Moreover, HTTP messages
are forwarded immediately unlike in SMTP, where messages are first stored and then forwarded
18. What is a proxy server and how it is related to HTTP?
Ans: A proxy server is a computer, which stores the copies of responses to most recently requests in
its cache so that further requests for these pages need not be sent ...