Release 4.0 Alpha 1 ------------------- HttpClient 4.0 represents a complete, ground-up redesign and almost a complete rewrite of the HttpClient 3.x codeline. This release finally addresses several design flaws that existed since the 1.0 release and could not be fixed without a major code overhaul and breaking API compatibility. The HttpClient 4.0 API is still very experimental and is bound to change during the course of the ALPHA development phase. Several important features have not yet been ported to the new API. Architectural changes --------------------- * Redesign of the HttpClient internals addressing all known major architectural shortcomings of the 3.x codeline * Cleaner, more flexible and expressive API * Better performance and smaller memory footprint due to a more efficient HTTP transport based on HttpCore. HttpClient 4.0 is expected to be 10% to 25% faster than HttpClient 3.x codeline * More modular structure * Pluggable redirect and authentication handlers * Support for protocol incerceptors * Improved connection management * Improved support for sending requests via a proxy or a chain of proxies * Improved handling redirects of entity enclosing requests * More flexible SSL context customization * Reduced intermediate garbage in the process of generating HTTP requests and parsing HTTP responses ------------------- HttpClient 3.x features that have NOT yet been ported ------------------- * NTLM authentication scheme * RFC2965 cookie policy (Cookie2) * Support for multipart MIME coded entities ------------------- The following is a list of contributions tracked in JIRA. Note that this is not a complete list of contributions or changes. Since the API was redesigned completely, tracking everything outside of the source code repository would have been too burdensome. * [HTTPCLIENT-655] User-Agent string no longer violates RFC Contributed by Oleg Kalnichevski * [HTTPCLIENT-541] Virtual host API redesign Contributed by Oleg Kalnichevski * [HTTPCLIENT-614] Allow for different strategies when checking CN of x509 certificates Contributed by Julius Davies * [HTTPCLIENT-136] Fixed inadequate proxy support Long standing architectural problem. Issue opened on 19/Dec/2002. Contributed by Oleg Kalnichevski * [HTTPCLIENT-63] Support for pluggable redirect and authentication handlers Long standing architectural problem. Issue opened on 15/Jul/2002. Contributed by Oleg Kalnichevski * [HTTPCLIENT-245] Fixed redirect handling. HttpClient can now automatically handle redirects of entity enclosing requests. Long standing architectural problem. Issue opened on 14/Jul/2003. Contributed by Oleg Kalnichevski * [HTTPCLIENT-613] HTTPS connections now verify CN of x509 certificates Contributed by Julius Davies * [HTTPCLIENT-497] Wire/header logger names consistent with class loggers Contributed by Oleg Kalnichevski * [HTTPCLIENT-484] AuthSSLProtocolSocketFactory in the main distribution Contributed by Oleg Kalnichevski * [HTTPCLIENT-589] Do not consume the remaining response content if the connection is to be closed Contributed by Roland Weber * [HTTPCLIENT-475] Support for unconnected sockets. HTTP requests can now be aborted while network socket is still being connected. Contributed by Roland Weber