What is HTTP Response?

HTTP Response is the packet of information sent by Server to the Client in response to an earlier Request made by Client. HTTP Response contains the information requested by the Client. For example, the request to Weather Web Service made in the HTTP Request tutorial will contain the weather details of the location.

Just like HTTP Request, HTTP Response also has the same structure:
Status Line
Headers, 0 or more Headers in the request
An optional Body of the Request

Response Status Line
A Status Line consists of three parts:
HTTP Protocol Version
Status Code
Reason Phrase

In the weather Rest Web Service example, lets scroll down the page to see the Response section. In the response section the first line is called the Status Line. As shown in the below image:



It is clearly visible that the Status Line has ;following information:
HTTP Protocol Version as (HTTP/1.1)
Status Code as 200
Status Message as OK

Response Header
Just after the Status Line, Headers are displayed. Just like a Request Header, Response Header also contains zero or more Header lines. However, it is very uncommon to have zero Headers in the response. Lines just after the Status Line and before the Response Body are all Response Headers lines. Headers are used to pass additional information to the Client. See the image below:


In the response Header, there is a header named Content-Type. The value of the header is application/json; charset=utf-8. It means that server is informing the client that the body of the response will contain a JSON formatted data. If client needs to make any sense out of the response body it should be interpret it as a JSON.

Response Body
Response Body contains the resource data that was requested by the client. In our example, City Hyderabad was requested for the weather data. . Look at the Response Body, it contains the weather information of the City. It also has the information about the Temperature, Humidity, Weather description and a few more weather properties of the city.



Note: Response Body contains text in JSON format, as one of the Response headers suggested.

In terms of Restful Web Services, the information requested by a client is referred to as a Resource. In this example, the Weather data corresponding to a city is a Resource.