Question

I’m a little confused about the HTTP protocol, from what i know HTTP was made for delivering web pages and primarily sending messages between a web server and a browser.
But it seems that HTTP is used anywhere in a lot of apps that indeed uses the internet for communicating but are not web application(“application that uses a web browser as a client”).

I’m asking this because i started developing an iPhone app (kind of navigation app) and i need to send messages between the iPhone client and my server. Now people keep telling me to use HTTP protocol, but is this really the way to go?

Answer 1

Your question is valid, if I can restate, why are we using HTTP for every Server-Client communications while it was meant typically for browser-web server use case and can be less efficient compared to direct TCP communication. My reasons below :

• HTTP protocol is extremely simple and like many things in tech simplicity trumps complexity even if the complex solution is more efficient (unless by a huge margin).
• HTTP protocol is stateless making it much simpler to scale horizontally by adding more machines and balance load by simple load balancing techniques like round robin.
• Easy to find a reasonable and free HTTP server to get your app up and running soon than implementing your own protocols, servers and taking your focus away from the real problem you want to solve.
• Like any simple technology used by many parties, it gets better with time and with modern features like Keep-Alive, chunked transfer, pipelining you can overcome some drawbacks of connections overheads.