Apache News Online

08 November 2007 - Apache Jakarta HttpComponents HttpClient 4.0-alpha2 Now Available

Apache Jakarta HttpComponents HttpClient 4.0-alpha2 release includes a number of improvements since the first ALPHA release in the 4.0 codeline, among which are improved connection pooling, support for proxy chains, redesigned HTTP state and authentication credentials management API, improved RFC 2965 cookie specification.

Architectural changes in HttpClient 4.0
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• 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 interceptors
• 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

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HttpClient 3.x features that have NOT yet been ported
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• NTLM authentication scheme
• Support for multipart MIME coded entities

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Download - http://jakarta.apache.org/site/downloads/downloads_httpcomponents-httpclient.cgi

Release notes - http://www.apache.org/dist/jakarta/httpcomponents/httpclient/RELEASE_NOTES.txt

HttpComponents site - http://jakarta.apache.org/httpcomponents/