It's not terrible, it just has a lot of fluff that you don't really need or want in an API call like chunked transfer encoding, request pipelining, redirect responses, mime encoding, content type negotiation, etc. Of course, you can just ignore all that stuff and either a) implement a stripped down, incomplete HTTP-ish protocol that has just the parts you need or b) use a full-blown HTTP implementation like nginx like most people do. The problem with (b) is when nginx suddenly starts behaving like an actual web server and you have to troubleshoot why it's now barfing on some UTF-16 encoding.