HTTP serving and traversing site data

Serving content from your site to your users is effectively a mechanism to generate HTTP responses to HTTP requests.

In Plone, answering to HTTP requests can be divided to three subproblems:

  • managing the lifecycle of the HTTP request and response pair;
  • publishing, by traversing the request to the target object by its URI;
  • choosing different parts of the code depending on active layers.

Plone and Zope 2 application servers support FTP, WebDAV and XML-RPC protocols besides plain HTTP.