Table of contents
Hello! In this post, i will discuss RFC 7231 document and the get and post methods discussed in the RFC 7231 document.
RFC 7231
What is RFC 7231? It is a document that defines HTTP 1.1. If you are unfamiliar with HTTP, HTTP is an application-layer protocol for sending hypermedia documents such as HTML and JSON. In the document, it defines semantics such as messages, request header fields, and response status codes.
Why should we care?
This document defines all methods such as GET, POST, and DELETE. As a developer, you may wonder about some details about how GET and POST work. Thus, developers can read the document and understand the spec of all semantics of HTTP.
GET
The GET method is used to retrieve information from the target resource. Some characteristics include
- body massage is not defined -> may cause some existing implementations to reject the request
- cacheable
POST
The POST method is used to make a request for the target resource to be processed. In other words, you are making a request to a server to process your information. With the post method, you could
- send a block of data
- create a new resource
- append data to a resource
- cache only when they include explicit freshness information -> not widely implemented
Simply put, the post request has the ability to create and update a resource.
Conclusion
RFC 7231 is a document that defines the semantics of HTTP. If you have some time, it is interesting to cherry-pick topics you would like to read. I left a link below if anyone is interested in. Feel free to comment any errors you see! Thank you for reading.