Overview of Zend\Http

Overview

Zend\Http is a primary foundational component of Zend Framework. Since much of what PHP does is web-based, specifically HTTP, it makes sense to have a performant, extensible, concise and consistent API to do all things HTTP. In nutshell, there are several parts of Zend\Http:

• Context-less Request and Response classes that expose a fluent API for introspecting several aspects of HTTP messages:
  • Request line information and response status information
  • Parameters, such as those found in POST and GET
  • Message Body
  • Headers
• A Client implementation with various adapters that allow for sending requests and introspecting responses.

Zend\Http Request, Response and Headers

The Request, Response and Headers portion of the Zend\Http component provides a fluent, object-oriented interface for introspecting information from all the various parts of an HTTP request or HTTP response. The two main objects are Zend\Http\Request and Zend\Http\Response. These two classes are “context-less”, meaning that they model a request or response in the same way whether it is presented by a client (to send a request and receive a response) or by a server (to receive a request and send a response). In other words, regardless of the context, the API remains the same for introspecting their various respective parts. Each attempts to fully model a request or response so that a developer can create these objects from a factory, or create and populate them manually.