Hi Oleg, It's been a month and I'm sorry for the delay. I've been sidetracked and also racking my brain to think of what could be relevent for a simple HttpClient Applet Utility.
Here are the pieces I could tackle, but I'm not sure how exactly I should approach each item with respect to HttpClient's focus. 1) VM and Sandbox issues - Since applets need to run in various browser VM's and may or may not be signed they will have different security issues. We avoided all these problems by restricting ourselves to Sun's 1.3 or greater plug-in with signed applets. This also meant signing the necessary apache jars to avoid any SecurityManager issues. Honestly, I don't think the HttpClient will work in most applets not in the plugin with signed jars simply because of the security violation of opening sockets. 2) Proxy Detection - This is simple enough if limited to Sun's plugin, but tougher if the desire is to support any environment the applet might run. The tough part is that separate protocols (HTTP, HTTPS, FTP) could each use different proxy servers if configured to do so. This is not standard practice among any of our users, but it could pose a problem for the HttpClient in that it only supports 1 proxy for all protocols. I'm not sure if the utility should even attempt to create a correctly configured HttpClient instance since 2 clients may be needed to support the different proxy servers. 3) Proxy Credentials - To eliminate the constant hassle of bothering the user for authentication credentials every time the applet is loaded, we store this information encrypted in the user home directory. This raises a few concerns since HttpClient requires the cleartext password to be used when authenticating to protocols like NTLM. If the password hash could be pre-calc'd, stored and later given to HttpClient it would be more secure. 4) Logging - HttpClient requires commons-logging and log4j. It also seems to need a log4j-core jar which appears to be optional. This is a little extra bulk to download and would be nice to eliminate with a simple logger implementation and configuration options. We also use SOAP / Axis in the applets for communication. Although those are other apache projects, we had to create custom transports using the httpclient since they do not use multi-threaded HTTP 1.1 connections that are cached. The custom transport offers huge improvements. This is probably something that we will contribute to these projects. Looking back at the issues, what I really see is more of a "best practice" or suggestions rather than an applet utility, with the exception of the proxy detection code. -Nick -----Original Message----- From: Oleg Kalnichevski [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, February 20, 2003 4:16 PM To: Commons HttpClient Project Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: proxy and howto's and some questions. Hi Nick > My company is currently using the HttpClient utility in an Applet > successfully through proxy servers detected by the browser. Here is > how the proxy settings are configured: If you were prepared to spend a bit of your time to make a simple applet utility (with proxy settings detection and other goodies), we would happily take it as the first contribution to the optional components repository Cheers Oleg --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]