Special Edition Using Java™ 2 Enterprise Edition

HTTPS—Secure HTTP

You might notice that when you visit a Web site that wants you to enter a credit card, the URL usually begins with https instead of http. The browser recognizes https as a request to use secure sockets to pass the data. The secure sockets layer (SSL) allows you to send encrypted data back and forth between the browser and the server. (Technically, it just provides encrypted traffic between any two endpoints, not specifically browsers and servers.)

The nice thing about using HTTP over SSL is that the HTTP protocol is still the same; just the Transport layer has changed. For example, if you had an SSL library that you could use with the Dumper program, you could connect to the Dumper with https and still see the HTTP headers exactly ...