HTTP in the context of "Universal Plug and Play"

The World Wide Web (also known as WWW, W3, or simply the Web) is an information system that enables content sharing over the Internet through user-friendly ways meant to appeal to users beyond IT specialists and hobbyists. It allows documents and other web resources to be accessed over the Internet according to specific rules of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP).

The Web was invented by English computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee while at CERN in 1989 and opened to the public in 1993. It was conceived as a "universal linked information system". Documents and other media content are made available to the network through web servers and can be accessed by programs such as web browsers. Servers and resources on the World Wide Web are identified and located through a character string called uniform resource locator (URL).

Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee (born 8 June 1955), also known as TimBL, is an English computer scientist best known as the inventor of the World Wide Web, HTML, the URL system, and HTTP. He is a professorial research fellow at the University of Oxford and a professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Berners-Lee proposed an information management system on 12 March 1989 and implemented the first successful communication between a Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) client and server via the Internet in mid-November. He devised and implemented the first Web browser and Web server and helped foster the Web's subsequent development. He is the founder and emeritus director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which oversees the continued development of the Web. He co-founded (with Rosemary Leith) the World Wide Web Foundation. In 2009, he was elected Foreign Associate of the National Academy of Sciences.

BitTorrent is a communication protocol for peer-to-peer file sharing (P2P), which enables users to distribute data and electronic files over the Internet in a decentralized manner. The act of downloading and uploading data via BitTorrent is also labeled "torrenting". The protocol is developed and maintained by Rainberry, Inc., and was first released in 2001.

To send or receive files, users use a BitTorrent client on their Internet-connected computer, which are available for a variety of computing platforms and operating systems, including an official client. BitTorrent trackers provide a list of files available for transfer and allow the client to find peer users, known as "seeds", who may transfer the files. BitTorrent downloading is considered to be faster than HTTP ("direct downloading") and FTP due to the lack of a central server that could limit bandwidth.

The Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is a signaling protocol used for initiating, maintaining, modifying, and terminating communication sessions that involve multimedia elements such as voice, video, and messaging. It operates at the application layer of the Internet protocol suite and is widely used in Internet telephony, private IP-based telephone systems, and mobile communication over LTE networks through VoLTE.

SIP is a text-based protocol modeled on the structure of HTTP and SMTP, enabling interoperability and integration with other Internet applications. It provides mechanisms for user location, session setup, and session management, making it a foundational component of modern IP multimedia systems.

In computer science, request–response or request–reply is one of the basic methods computers use to communicate with each other in a network, in which the first computer sends a request for some data and the second responds to the request. More specifically, it is a message exchange pattern in which a requestor sends a request message to a replier system, which receives and processes the request, ultimately returning a message in response. It is analogous to a telephone call, in which the caller must wait for the recipient to pick up before anything can be discussed. This is a simple but powerful messaging pattern which allows two applications to have a two-way conversation with one another over a channel; it is especially common in client–server architectures.

Request–response pattern can be implemented synchronously (such as web service calls over HTTP) or asynchronously.

A web service (WS) is either:

• a service offered by an electronic device to another electronic device, communicating with each other via the Internet, or
• a server running on a computer device, listening for requests at a particular port over a network, serving web documents (HTML, JSON, XML, images).

In a web service, a web technology such as HTTP is used for transferring machine-readable file formats such as XML and JSON.

XMLHttpRequest (XHR) is an API in the form of a JavaScript object whose methods transmit HTTP requests from a web browser to a web server. The methods allow a browser-based application to send requests to the server after page loading is complete, and receive information back. XMLHttpRequest is a component of Ajax programming. Prior to Ajax, hyperlinks and form submissions were the primary mechanisms for interacting with the server, often replacing the current page with another one.

The Gopher protocol (/ˈɡoʊfər/ ) is a communication protocol designed for distributing, searching, and retrieving documents in Internet Protocol networks. The design of the Gopher protocol and user interface is menu-driven, and presented an alternative to the World Wide Web in its early stages, but ultimately fell into disfavor, yielding to Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). The Gopher ecosystem is often regarded as the effective predecessor of the World Wide Web.