Hi Chris, Glad to see you're back! On Wed, Jun 17, 2009 at 2:24 AM, Christopher Kohlhoff<chris@kohlhoff.com> wrote:
Hi all,
I have just released a new Boost.Asio-based library, Urdl, which can be used for accessing and downloading web content.
<http://think-async.com/Urdl> <http://sourceforge.net/projects/urdl>
It currently has limited support for the protocols "http", "https" and "file". It provides an easy-to-use extension to standard C++ iostreams and an asynchronous interface for use with Boost.Asio.
My feedback: * The #1 feature should be supporting http 1.1 well (also https). Many libaries provide a http 1.0 implementation but fail short of supporting the many options http provides (I know this is a huge undertaking!) . At this point I don't see the value of supporting file (or planning to support ftp). In this case, I don't understand the value of future support for runtime polymorphism (can you explain how user-supplied backends would work ?) * It would be great to clarify why you based the design on a buffered stream (below are my perceived pros/cons): Pros - easy to add support for new protocols with read_until - easier header parsing Cons - increased implementation complexitiy with istreambuf - Maybe small performance penalty * In detail/http_read_stream.hpp open_coro chains the whole sequence from connecting to request/response. I think it would be better to split it in two coroutines (one for opening the connection and another for sending a request and getting a reply). This would make it easier to later implement keep-alive. * A newbie question: In open_coro you don't use Stream as a template parameter. Is this because Stream is a reference and you don't need to enforce any concept ? (I am trying to learn from your great coding practices :) ) Thank you for sharing your library ! regards jose