HttpClient 5.4 is going to be the most feature rich minor release probably since 4.3. There are plenty of small and not so small features and improvements in it. Overall it is going to be a great release.
It will likely take a few more months to stablize it but somethime around mid Summer we should be able to release the first GA. That is the plan. However beyond 5.4 our development plans are unclear. We can settle for no particular plan and simply react to feature requests from our users or we could invest some efforts and time proactively. Both approaches are perfectly valid given the scarcity of project resources. If we choose a more proactive stance there are several potential features we could work on core: * Better / more efficient implementation of channel (socket) timeout handling in the async i/o reactor. What we currently have is quite bad for a large number of concurrent sessions * CONNECT method support and connection tunneling for HTTP/2 * HTTP/2 for the classic transport (now with introduction of virtual threads (fibers) in Java 21 we could revisit the issue of the classic i/o model not working well for multiplexing protocols and try to solve the problem by utilizing two fibers per HTTP/2 data stream) * JRE level upgrade client: * Multipart entity support for the async transport * Transparent content compression / decompression for the async transport * Query timeout / request deadline support * JRE level upgrade The real 1'000'000 USD question for us as a project however what the hell we are going to do about HTTP/3? HTTP/3 and QUIC dwarfs everytihng we have done so far in terms of complexity. Do we have resources to pull it off? Do we attempt to build our own QUIC layer or do we wait until QUIC is supported and provided by JRE? Is QUIC even in scope for us? The subject of HTTP/3 support is so big that it probably deserves a separate discussion. What do you, guys, think? How shall we proceed? Oleg --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@hc.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@hc.apache.org
