Hyper text transfer protocol (HTTP) is commanly used to communicate with web applications. Before you start learning web application development using Servlets and Java Server Pages, you need to have the basic understanding of the HTTP protocol. Most of the time you will write servlets that processes request made over HTTP protocol.
This tutorial provides basic overview of HTTP protocol. It provides information about the most frequently used HTTP request methods GET and POST, difference between HTTP GET and HTTP POST request methods and explains query strings.