Designing Evolvable Web APIs with ASP.NET
by Glenn Block, Pablo Cibraro, Pedro Felix, Howard Dierking, Darrel Miller
Chapter 1. The Internet, the World Wide Web, and HTTP
To harness the Web, you need to understand its foundations and design.
We start our journey toward Web APIs at the beginning. In the late 1960s the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET), a series of network-based systems connected by the TCP/IP protocol, was created by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agenecy (DARPA). Initially, it was designed for universities and research laboratories in the US to share data. (see Figure 1-1).
ARPANET continued to evolve and ultimately led in 1982 to the creation of a global set of interconnected networks known as the Internet. The Internet was built on top of the Internet protocol suite (also known as TCP/IP), which is a collection of communication protocols. Whereas ARPANET was a fairly closed system, the Internet was designed to be a globally open system connecting private and public agencies, organizations, individuals, and insitutions.
In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee, a scientist at CERN, invented the World Wide Web, a new system for accessing linked documents via the Internet with a web browser. Navigating the documents of the Web (which were predominantly written in HTML) required a special application protocol, the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). This protocol is at the center of what drives websites and Web APIs.

In this ...