The purpose of this module is to provide access to the headers of HTTP request and responses in a structured way. The HTTP Servlet Request and Response classes provided as part of Java EE make the headers available as integers, longs, strings and enumeration of strings. These methods provide only the most basic representation of the header field values.

The HTTP specification provides definitions for many header fields. This allows more detailed representations to be constructed. These representations provide greater utility than the representations that can be retrieved from the HTTP servlet request and responses.

The integers and longs are not the focus of this module as these are already returning parsed values. The longs are used to represent dates which means that the return values will be more useful when converted to Date or Calendar objects but this is a trivial task. The focus is on those headers the are returned as strings.