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https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/AXIS2-4318?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel&focusedCommentId=12712456#action_12712456
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Andreas Veithen commented on AXIS2-4318:
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Applying the changes to the trunk and maintaining them afterwards will be quite
challenging. There are several reasons for this:
- The baseline for the patch is 1.4 and there have been other fixes and changes
in the code.
- Since 1.4, the code of the HTTP transport has been moved twice (first to
WS-Commons Transport and than back to Axis2 into a separate Maven module). What
makes it worse is that the first move was not done correctly (local copy + svn
add instead of svn copy/move), so that it's difficult to get the version
history back to 1.4.
- The conclusion of the discussion on the mailing list [1] was to keep
implementations for both commons-httpclient 3.1 and for httpclient 4.0, which I
believe is a good thing. On the other hand this means that instead of just
applying the patch and throwing out commons-httpclient, we need to create some
sort of fork. From Guillaume's patch it is clear that these two implementations
will have a lot of duplicate logic and code. This will cause maintenance issues
(fixes or enhancements applied to one implementation, but not the other, etc.).
For these reasons I would prefer a different approach, which is to first
refactor the current HTTP implementation to isolate all the commons-httpclient
3.1 specific code from the purely Axis2 related code that would be common to
the two implementations. Using Guillaume's experience we would then build a
httpclient 4.0 implementation on top of it.
This is only realistic if we can build a group of people who support that
effort by analyzing the existing code, contributing new code and/or actively
testing the code. Who of you is ready to support this effort? Please note that
the baseline for this development would be Axis2 1.5 (which will be released
next week).
[1] http://markmail.org/thread/m2tsumqxvfiel2bg
> Upgrade CommonsHTTPTransportSender to use httpclient 4.0
> --------------------------------------------------------
>
> Key: AXIS2-4318
> URL: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/AXIS2-4318
> Project: Axis 2.0 (Axis2)
> Issue Type: Improvement
> Affects Versions: 1.4.1
> Reporter: Guillaume Jeudy
> Attachments: workinprogress.patch
>
>
> 3 areas currently using commons-httpclient 3.1:
> 1. The code that interfaces between Axis2 and the underlying
> transport, e.g. the Stub class. This code only refers to
> org.apache.commons.httpclient.Header and could easily be made
> independent of commons-httpclient. This is what the patch in
> AXIS2-3933 does.
> 2. MultipartFormDataFormatter uses code from commons-httpclient to
> build multipart/form-data requests. Maybe this code should be
> rewritten to use HttpMime [1] and/or mime4j.
> 3. The code in the HTTP transport. Note that in Axis2 1.5 this code is
> no longer part of the kernel and lives in a separate module. The core
> question here is whether we should upgrade that code from
> commons-httpclient 3.1 to HttpClient 4.0 or if it is better to keep
> two separate transport sender implementations (at least temporarily).
> It would be interesting to get Oleg's opinion on this.
> For the legal issue around NTLM, I think the best solution is to allow
> the user to register additional AuthSchemeFactory classes in the
> transport configuration in axis2.xml. People who need NTLM can than
> use the code from [2].
> [1] http://hc.apache.org/httpcomponents-client/httpmime/index.html
> [2] http://hc.apache.org/httpcomponents-client/ntlm.html
> I am willing to provide a patch to upgrade to httpclient 4.0. I have
> completed some work locally and I believe most of the existing functionality
> has been replicated successfully in httpclient 4.0 but still more areas need
> to be settled before the local work becomes a candidate for commit into the
> trunk.
> Unanswered questions/proposals:
> 1) I assume upgrading to httpclient 4.0 rather than providing a separate
> transport is the best long term solution.
> 2) Drop support for 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 this option 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.
> 3) drop authenticator preemptive authentication support
> 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 from the trunk; alternatively we can 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 properties to configure a
> BasicHttpContext for use with the HttpClient. As a workaround/alternative the
> user could fully initialize it's own AbstractHttpClient instance and pass it
> through the existing CACHED_HTTP_CLIENT option.
> 3) Drop support for HTTPConstants.AUTO_RELEASE_CONNECTION
> httpclient 4.0 already releases http connections (to the connection 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. Should
> Axis2 1.4 kernel module still use java compliance 1.4, should we change
> source compliance for the kernel to 1.5?
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