Request/Response

The HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is a great example of a simple, effective request/response model used on the Web to request and respond to requests for HTML and other content. Example 2-4 shows a typical HTTP request/response pairing, where GET /home.html HTTP/1.0 is the request, and everything else, starting with HTTP/1.1 200 OK, is the response.

Example 2-4. A typical HTTP request/response

GET /home.html HTTP/1.0

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Mon, 11 Jun 2001 13:43:13 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.12 (Unix) mod_perl/1.24
Last-Modified: Fri, 09 Jun 2000 13:47:56 GMT
ETag: "8a69-6a-3940f58c"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 306
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html

<html>
<head>
...

It shows us the request verb GET and the specification of what to retrieve (the /home.html document), and it shows us what is returned in response.

While we’ve already seen that the Jabber protocol is asynchronous in nature, there is a similar request/response model available, too, which tends to the synchronous (i.e., first request, then response), although, unlike HTTP, the response is not guaranteed to immediately follow the request. Other unrelated Jabber fragments may be received in the stream in the time between request and response. This request/response model is called Info/Query, or IQ for short; the Jabber element employed in the implementation of this model is <iq/>.

This IQ model has many uses in providing Jabber’s basic IM features. Figure 2-1 shows the element ...

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