Re: Bringing the HttpCilent features up to parity with other libraries / langauges

[Erix Yao <er...@gmail.com>]

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2009/3/3 James Abley <ja...@gmail.com>

> Hi,
>
> I've got a couple of suggestions that I thought might be worth kicking
> around here.
>
> I think that as an end-user of HttpClient, it demands too much
> knowledge of RFC2616. People shouldn't have to be aware of
> gzip-compression or other content-encodings that may be available,
> unless they want to specifically handle them.
>
> For example, Joe Gregorio's excellent httplib2 [1] for Python.
>
> >>> import httplib2
> >>> response, content = http.request('http://www.apache.org/')
>
> Using Wireshark, I can see that the request is made and supports
> compress and gzip encodings without the client developer having to
> know RFC2616 intimately or worry about handling the low level details
> like that.
>
> GET / HTTP/1.1
> Host: www.apache.org
> accept-encoding: compress, gzip
> user-agent: Python-httplib2/$Rev: 259 $
>
> httplib2 also has great in-built cache support and understands ETag /
> Last-Modified to transparently do conditional GET when required.
> Should conditional GET be handled by HttpClient? I think that it
> should; I think Restlet offers support for this. I'm sure there are
> other comparisons that could be made with other languages / libraries.
>
> I know that HttpClient 4 can offer support for gzip compression via a
> custom protocol interceptor (thanks Oleg!) but my personal view is
> that adds to the semantic surface area for a user of the API.
>
> Are these reasonable feature requests; i.e.
>
> 1. Good support for gzip Content Codings [2]. Others can be easily
> supported as well, but gzip is the most common.
> 2. Support a private cache / enable transparent conditional GET.
>
> Cheers,
>
> James
>
> [1] http://code.google.com/p/httplib2/
> [2] http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec3.html#sec3.5
>
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