HTTP stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol. HTTP is the networking protocol that is used to transfer information over the World Wide Web.

HTTP defines four basic operations (requests) made by clients to servers:

• Get
• Put
• Post
• Delete

These HTTP requests correspond to standard database CRUD operations:

• Create (corresponds with Put)
• Retrieve (corresponds with Get)
• Update (corresponds with Post)
• Delete (corresponds with Delete)

HTTP also defines a variety of header parameters that may be included with requests; these header parameters specify language, desired media type for response, character encoding, time stamps for resources, etc.  In addition, HTTP defines a collection of codes automatically used in response to HTTP requests; these codes indicate various success, error, or redirect conditions. A particularly infamous HTTP code is 404: Not Found.

HTTP is defined by an Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Request for Comment (RFC) document: http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2616.