What is the difference between query and request

Request means ask for something and it shall be given. You need that thing. Query means ask whether or not something is true/ available or false/not available, you may not get that thing back but you'll get the status, state or info.

Request means ask to collect that object. Query means ask to confirm the state of an object ex. Availability, true/false,

Can I have some food to eat? You are requesting for food.

Is that way good? This is a Query:

A request is like when I ask you to go to the supermarket. Here, I’m requesting you to leave your current place, go to the supermarket to bring one or many items and come back. Now, you can go to the supermarket but once you arrive you will ask yourself, what should I bring? In order to make your visit to the supermarket successful, I should give you a list of things that you need to bring or do at the supermarket, give you a description for the items and tell you in which aisle or department you can find them. This list now is representing your query.

So, if your client needs to fetch some data for example from a remote server, you will need to make a request. This request has a type, like ‘GET’ to fetch resources or data back, or ‘POST’ to do an operation like creating a new user account.

For the request to do its job, you have to specify what data or resources you need this request to fetch and where to find it. It’s like what items do you need to buy from the supermarket and from which aisle can you find them. For example, your request can have a query to return a specific user’s data based on his id. But you need to know to whom should you send the request with this query in order to get the user’s data back based on the passed id.

In order to make a request, you need to send it to your backend’s application that you can access using an IP or a domain mapped to it. Something like: “http://www.mywebsite.com”. But to fetch specific type of data, like the user’s data you need to tell your backend application what are you searching for. This is specified by something called the “path”. For example: “http://www.mywebsite.com/users”. The path here is the “/users” part. The query works when you submit to this domain with the path one or more query parameters, like the user’s id. So, you will make a GET request to “http://www.mywebsite.com/users/1234”, where “1234” here is representing the user’s id that you need to fetch its data. It’s like telling you to go to the supermarket named “mywebsite.com”, go to the “users” isle or department and grab the item with the id “1234”.

I hope that I managed to simplify the concepts a little bit for you.

Mohammed's answer above is great and very detailed. In summary:

• First of all, query and request can both be nouns and verbs. E.g:

  • I requested a refund.
  • We received a request for a refund.
  • I queried the price.
  • We received a query about the price.

• To request something is to ask for something, an object or a favour etc. A request is a polite demand. To query is to ask about something i.e. you are wanting information. A query is a question.

• Also, QUERY is an inquiry(Query and inquiry are synonyms) They are both requests but the difference is that the QUERY is a precise request. In informatics, if you need information about something you need to send a specific request with precise information.

"I queried information about user account Maxim Pavlov" = "I need to know about this website users. In particular, I need to know if there is any Maxim Pavlov registered on this site".

• If you are Arabic, best translations in Arabic would be, request = طلب and query = إستعلام)

I thought about this question and I think the Ahmed's answer is misleading to say the least.

When web developers talk about request, they usually mean request done via HTTP. There are other protocols, but HTTP is certainly the most common. Request tend to be fourfold: get, post, put and delete. A request is almost always associated with an endpoint. A request is more than just ask for something. For instance, a put request is basically either add information or a file stored on a web server or update it. On the other hand, a query, in the language of a web developer, typically means some information he would like to extract from the database where a certain condition needs to be met.

I will give you an example. When building an API, you may have just two endpoints which are mapping to a post request and a get request. When you hit the endpoint associated with the get request, by design it will always return the "current time" which requires no query in a database. Meanwhile, when you hit the endpoint associated with the post request, by design it will always get the leap years between, say, 1900 and 2000 which are all stored in the database and requires a database query to fetch that information back to you.

The Abdullatif's answer is by and large correct though.