HTTP GET requests are the simplest way of retrieving input from the user. You might have noticed question marks in URLs while browsing the Web. When submitting a term in the search box on the website, your search term will usually appear in the URL, and look something like this:
example.com/search?query=weather
The bit after the question mark represents a named GET argument. The name is query
and the value, weather
. Although arguments like these are usually automatically created through HTML input boxes, the user can also manually insert them into the URL, or they can be part of a clickable link that is sent to the user. HTTP GET is designed to get limited, non-sensitive information from the user in order for the server to return a page as requested by the GET arguments. By convention, GET requests should never modify the server state in a way that produces side effects, that is, the user should be able to make exactly the same request multiple times and always...