The venerable HyperText Transport Protocol is one of the oldest and most ubiquitous still in use. Virtually every system in development today involves HTTP to some degree, and over its lifespan it has evolved to include features and use cases that would be unimaginable to Tim Berners-Lee and his contemporaries. The result of this ubiquity is that HTTP informs the architecture of modern software at all layers of the stack: whether managing state with Redux, modeling MySQL transactions or designing a network backbone, HTTP has had a tremendous influence on how we architect and build modern software.
Which begs the question: how can such a simple premise - moving bits of text from here to there - end up driving so much progress? Join me as we delve into the problems HTTP solved, the problems it created and the problems it aims to solve again!
A programming junkie and computer history aficionado, Tomer's been an avid software professional for almost two decades, during which he's built any number of (predominantly back-end) systems, cofounded two major Israeli user groups (Java.IL and Underscore), organized an annual Scala conference (Scalapeño) and is a recurring speaker at software conferences. Plying his trade as a gun-for-hire at Substrate, he secretly still hopes to realize his childhood dream of becoming a lion tamer.