Let’s Go Deep! Part I: How HTTP Requests Work

Recently, an astute reader of my blog pointed me to a great post about the importance of having technical skills as a software tester.  The author makes an excellent analogy: a software tester who doesn’t understand technical concepts is like a surgeon who doesn’t understand anatomy.  If we are going to test our applications thoroughly, we should understand the underlying systems that make them work.

I freely admit that I am not an expert in networking, or even in how the Internet works.  But I’m willing to learn, and pass that information on to you!  So let’s go deep!  We’ll begin this week with how HTTP requests work.

When you type an website’s address into a Web browser, you are typing a URL.  A URL (Uniform Resource Locator) is simply a fancy name for a web address.  The URL contains a domain name.  The domain name identifies a specific grouping of servers on the Internet.  Examples of domain names would be google.com or amazon.com.
Once the browser has the domain name, it uses it to look up the associated IP address in the DNS (Domain Name System), which is a database that contains all the mappings of domain names and IP addresses.  An IP address (Internet Protocol address) is a unique series of numbers that is assigned to every device that is connected to the Internet.  
Once the IP address is known, a connection is opened to that address using HTTP.  HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) is an application protocol that allows information to be transmitted electronically.  
Once the connection is opened to the server at the IP address, a request can be made to get information from that server.  Information sent over the Internet is called a message.  The request uses TCP (Transmission Control Protocol), which is a system of delivering messages over the Internet.  
The TCP divides a message into a series of packets, which are fragments of between 1000 and 3000 characters.  Each packet has a series of headers, which include the address of the packet’s destination, information about the ordering of the packets, and other important information.  
If for any reason a packet doesn’t make it to its destination, the client (the address making the request) can request a packet to be resent.  Once all the packets have arrived, the client reassembles them according to the instructions in the header.
It’s no secret that information sent over the Internet can be vulnerable to security attacks.  A malicious user can intercept HTTP requests and get sensitive information from them or manipulate them to make requests that will return sensitive information.  For this reason, data sent over the Internet is often encrypted or protected.  We’ll learn more about this in my next post, which will be on encryption, tokens, and cookies!

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