On Feb 9, 2008, at 7:42 AM, David M. Lloyd wrote:
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.
Not sure why one needs to specify the URL so far in advance.
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])
Good stuff. I'm glad these important features will most likely not
drive the API.
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
Could this not be in the HttpClient? If we follow the metaphor of a
browser, it makes sense to store the session there.
4) Future objects for any blocking operation
I was thinking that we could have a Future object that implements an
AHC callback interface. This would keep the client simple. Those
needing synchronous mechanisms could drop in an instance of this
Future object. Just trying to prevent something like:
ah.doThisWay().addListener(bar);
foo = ahc.doAnotherWay();
foo.await();
5) The (optional) ability to specify an IoConnector to the client
This could maybe be specified in the factory to use when allocating
clients.
Regards,
Alan
