Distributed Computing with Go

A brief history of HTTP

In order to better understand the advantages of the REST protocol, let us take a small detour into how the internet was used before the REST web protocol came onto the scene. The internet in 1990s was mostly used to store and share documents as marked up documents using HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol). For this chapter, HTTP can be summarized as follows:

• HTTP is a network communication protocol that starts with an HTTP request and ends with an HTTP response.
• HTTP responses during the early periods consisted of plain text documents, but soon the HTML format gained traction as it allowed for more stylized documents.
• Web browsers brought in a new age of internet: merely displaying text documents with different font ...