In this chapter, let us see how the Spring Integration package supports the HTTP protocol. We shall also look into HTTP and its features to get a better understanding of performing HTTP operations with the Spring framework.

HTTP stands for Hyper Text Transfer Protocol, which, in turn, stands for secure connection. This protocol comes under an application layer used for data transfer. It uses Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) communication for data transfers. HTTP is a connectionless and stateless protocol, since the server and client are only aware of each other during request and response time. Any type of data can be sent across HTTP, as long as the server and client are able to handle it. The requests are sent via a web URL, that is a uniform resource locator. The URL contains the following parts: http://www.domainname.com/path/?abc=xyz