4.6 KiB
HTTP
At the heart of the web lies HTTP. HTTP (or HyperText Transfer Protocol) is used for communicating multiple types of media between a client and a server.
HTTP comes in two major versions. HTTP/1 and HTTP/2. Vapor comes with HTTP/1 support by default but has an official package for HTTP/2, too.
What is the difference?
HTTP/1 is a protocol designed in the '90s for the then new and rapidly evolving internet. The protocol is designed around simplicity above security and functionality.
HTTP/2 is a protocol with security and performance in mind. Designed with experience of the past 20 years of internet in addition to modern standards such as a high bandwidth and many resources per page.
How it works
At the heart of HTTP lie the Request and Response. Both of them are "HTTP Messages". Both HTTP messages consists of Headers and a body.
HTTP clients connect to an HTTP server. The clients can send a request to which the server will send a response.
Bodies contain the concrete information being transferred. Think of the web-page, images, videos, JSON and forms.
Headers contain metadata.
Cookies are metadataabout the client that, for example, can be used for identifying users after they've (successfully) logged in. One of these methods are session tokens.
Another type of metadata can be related to the content. For example, defining the type of content transferred in the body.
Request
Requests have two additional properties in addition to all properties of a Message. The Method and path.
The path is used to specify the resource being accessed. Although there are conventions, there are no rules/limitations to how you structure your paths except their format. Paths consist of components. The components are separated by a forward slash (/). All components must be encoded with percent encoding, affecting special characters only.
The method indicated the operation to this resource. GET is used for reading a resource where DELETE will (attempt to) remove the resource. This does not mean you need to blindly comply. If a user doesn't have the permissions for said operation, you can emit a response indicating this.
Response
Responses have one additional property in addition to the message's properties. This is the status code. The status code is used to indicate to the client what the status/result is of a Request. If a client was not authenticated, for example, you would return a status 401 or 403 for "Unauthorized" or "Forbidden" respectively. More about status codes here.
Handling requests
Requests in Vapor will be handled by a router. This allows registering a path to a method. For example, registering .get("users") will register the path /users/ to the method GET. The responder/closure associated with this route can then handle requests sent to /users/ with the GET method.
Types of endpoints
In the web we usually define two types of endpoints. Either a website or an API. Websites are HTML pages, usually with associated styling, code and images. APIs are endpoints that communicate with raw information rather than types and user friendly information. APIs are aimed to developers and their applications.
iOS and Android apps usually communicate with an API, where a web browser such as Safari, Firefox, Chrome or Edge will usually communicate with a website.
Websites
Websites come in two major flavours. Server and client rendered pages. "Rendering" in this context doesn't mean the graphical rendering on your monitor, but instead the way information is injected into the HTML DOM to display the information to the users.
Server rendered pages make use of a templating system such as leaf whereas client rendered pages communicate with an API.
API
APIs are endpoints that sometimes receive but always reply with raw data. The raw data can be in any format. Most commonly, APIs communicate with JSON. Sometimes, they communicate with XML or other data types. Vapor can flexibly switch between supported formats, both by official or by community made libraries.
APIs in Vapor are (almost) always creating using a "MVC" or "Model View Controller" model which we explain here.
Designing an API in Vapor is really simple. We dive into this from here.