Question

What are the benefits of using headers in php? I am working on rest based web services.

and for JSON what headers are necessary? What are the advantages of headers?

Answer 1

One use can be to tell the browser what kind of media the response is. In your case, you could tell the browser not to cache the response and what kind of media it is.

For exmple :

header('Cache-Control: no-cache, must-revalidate');
header('Expires: Mon, 26 Jul 1997 05:00:00 GMT');
header('Content-type: application/json');

You can also use header to know what if the request is ajax. Another use which is really important in your case is to know the request type post, get, delete or what have you.