Alan D. Cabrera wrote:
I like the metaphor of a browser. The HttpClientFactory is nice as the holder of the shared resources. The HttpClient can be thought of as a browser. It holds cookies, etc. With that said, the URL belongs in the request not the HttpClient constructor.
That's a good thought. The reason that the URL was originally put in the HttpClient constructor (as well as the request) was to allow the management of connections to be separated from the URL request. Realistically, a URL could be dropped in favor of discrete scheme/hostname/port parameters on an connection object. Though it's not always desirable to do this, so specifying and maintaining a physical connection should be an optional kind of thing to do. I'm not picky as far as API goes, but I'd like to see the following (many of these items have been stated by others, but here's a roundup): 1) The ability to control connections independently of requests 2) Pipelining & keepalive (which should be a direct consequence of [1]) 3) "Session" things like cookie management should be maintained at a higher level - maybe even a separate "HttpSession" object that can be provided to each request, on a read-only or read-write basis 3a) "HttpSession" should be a interface of some type, so the user can intercept cookie reads and writes and act on them directly 4) Future objects for any blocking operation 5) The (optional) ability to specify an IoConnector to the client Hope I'm making sense. - DML
