Hi,
I have been spending the day on a bug I was getting in Cactus ... and it
appeared the bug seems to be in HttpURLConnection under JDK 1.3 windows. It
doesn't handle correctly the case when the server returns an empty response.
It simply blocks, waiting for data ... It block for some servers (Resin,
Tomcat 4, ...) and works for others (Tomcat 3.2, Orion 1.4, ...).
The question is : what should I do ? I have imagined the following solutions
:
1* Do nothing and simply warn users that their test cases need to return
something (under JDK 1.3). I don't think it is practicable.
2* Manage to always send something back. Problem is it is difficult and a
ugly hack. This is the solution I had until now but I don't like the hack :
need to send a magic keyword on the server side and remove it on the client
side so that the output stream can be asserted by the test case. Also, it
prevents a lot of factorising as it means a different handling for JSPs than
for servlets. And even for servlets, if the servlet does a forward, the
server will raise an exception (which I was catching but still ulgy) ...
3* Use a replacement to Sun's HttpURLConnection. It is a pity because it is
nice to use something standard and in any event, I'd like to go back to it
once it is fixed (maybe JDK 1.4 ?). This is really where we are missing
contributions from users for bug fixes at least (Sun would not accept them
... sigh). I hate to bring in another framework (i.e. another jar) and thus
add some complexity and dependency. Solutions are : HTTPClient (it is a nice
solution as it is supposed to be transparent by simply providing another
provider for the HttpURLConnection abstract class by using
the -Djava.protocol.handler.pkgs parameter. However, it does not work as it
handles cookies differently for example and I would need to rewrite some
part of the code. Too bad, that would have been a good solution I think).
Another solution is commens httpclient (needs complete rewriting of the HTTP
related code as it does not work as a protocol handler and I would hate to
do that just to correct a bug of Sun).
4* Find another simple implementation of HttpURLConnection that I would
include in the Cactus code (changing only the package). Not found so far ...
I'll keep looking. I have found one but it was not handle sending POST
parameters ...
5* Write my own one, just implementing what I need (by looking at commons
httpclient). My fear is that it may be bigger than what I thought at first.
For example, I'll need to support proxies and then someone will ask later on
for HTTPS, ...
I am a bit tired tonight and not sure what is best... I would like option 4
but cannot find one. Would you know one ?
Thanks a lot
-Vincent
