HTTP transport features and upgrading to httpclient 4.0

["Jeudy, Guillaume" <gj...@teksystems.com>]

Hi,
 
I thought I'd start a separate thread for this. That email is in scope of CommonsHTTPTransportSender upgrade to httpclient 4.0. I'm considering dropping support for:

1) HTTPConstants.CUSTOM_PROTOCOL_HANDLER option

Reason DefaultHttpClient already supports http and https schemes by default do we really want to allow a user to use a different scheme/socketfactory combination? This doesn't seem to be a commonly used feature.

If we still need to support it then an instance of Scheme would need to be passed in by the user and registered in the SchemeRegistry in turn used to build the HttpClient. We can no longer use a DefaultHttpClient if we do this, we would have to extend it most likely.

2) authenticator.getPreemptiveAuthentication()

Preemptive authentication is considered unsecure and is strongly discouraged. Moreover the code found in examples: http://hc.apache.org/httpcomponents-client/examples.html is no longer officially supported. Which means that we should drop preemptive authentication support or we have to allow a number of pluggable mechanisms to allow users to enable preemptive auth. The user would have to provide HttpRequestInterceptor and HttpResponseInterceptor implementations as well as a means to pass a BasicHttpContext properly configured for use with the HttpClient. As a workaround/alternative the user could fully initialize it's own AbstractHttpClient instance and pass it through CACHED_HTTP_CLIENT option.

3) HTTPConstants.AUTO_RELEASE_CONNECTION

httpclient 4.0 already releases the http connection (to the pool) after every http method execution. Therefore this property becomes obsolete.

4) Axis2 and java compiler source compliance setting? I see that some axis2 modules still compile with 1.4 source compliance. Should this be supported? On mailing lists I saw that Axis2 already started moving to java 5. Axis2 1.4 kernel module still uses java compliance 1.4, should we upgrade to 1.5?
 
Thanks,
-Guillaume Jeudy


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