Hi,
Can someone give us non-APR peeps a basic rundown of serf. It seems to be a ring in and has all the qualities of Commons candidate from what people say. However it does not have a separate website that I could see and nor does it have anything besides developer documentation in CVS (that I could see anyways).
So someone wanna give a spiel on it? Do we plan for it to be our road test?
Serf serves two purposes - getting a solid BSD-licensed HTTP client library out there (something I think we're in a good position to deliver) as well as testing some filtering ideas originating from httpd-2.0 that may eventually trickle back in to httpd itself.
The people who have written code or given suggestions to serf (so far) are pretty much a subset of the crowd that wrote that silly HTTP server (usual suspects of me, Aaron, Greg, Sander, Ian, and Cliff). Most of the conversation though has been dominated to a large degree by Aaron, Greg, and myself. Even though we don't have a lot of time to code on it, we do believe that we need such a solution. (Perhaps we can make some progress at the Hackathon? Oooh!)
As I hinted out earlier, we would like to take some of the data abstraction techniques we learned in the development of httpd-2.0 (filters and buckets) and do a better job of it. Some of the filter paradigm in httpd-2.0 doesn't strike us as 'quite right,' so we sort of want a playground to test new ideas.
Flood, an HTTP tester over in the HTTP Server Project, and Subversion are potential candidates for use of Serf. So, even if no one outside of our little group likes it, we will probably use it somewhere ourselves.
And, there is *some* code already in apr-serf's repository. -- justin
