Hi all,
We've just re-architected our HTTP layer to be able to switch between
HttpClient and the standard JRE classes as with JRE 1.5 Sun's classes
now do NTLM authentication without requiring the user to be prompted
(but in older JRE's it can't do NTLM at all and HttpClient provides a
bunch of other benefits as well).
The biggest problem we have (and a common cause of problems for
others on this list) is needing to call releaseConnection all the
time. If you are reading the entire response and dealing with it in
one place this is easy to take care of but if you ever need to open a
HTTP connection and then pass off the input stream to various other
parts of the application, this becomes a pain to manage.
With all the redesigning of HttpClient that's going on, what options
do we have for removing the need for user managed calls to
releaseConnection? We already release the connection automatically
if the entire response stream is read and I think if the input stream
is closed as well - in what situations is this not enough?
* IOException or other exception while reading from the stream. Our
input stream wrapper could catch this and release the connection then
rethrow the exception.
* Situations where the response from the server is discarded. This
is most common with error responses from servers like 404s etc but
can happen when the start of the response indicates in some software
specific manner that the rest of the content is irrelevant (eg: an
XML declaration that indicates that the file's version is 2.0 and not
supported by the parser). I'm not sure how to deal with this case
though requiring the user to close the input stream would match how
input streams are normally used, avoid having to read the entire
response and release the connection (the connection of course
couldn't be reused by that's probably a fair trade off given the
saving in not having to download the content).
What other situations are there that would need to be handled? This
always seemed like a straight out required part of the architecture
but it is surprisingly annoying when you try to integrate HttpClient
into an application without having it pervade the entire codebase.
Am I crazy? Thoughts?
Regards,
Adrian Sutton.
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