Re: Base: networking APIs

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

> On 15 Aug 2017, at 14:33, Daniel Ferreira (theiostream) <address@hidden> 
> wrote:
> 
> Hi everyone (and Richard in particular),
> 
> Lately a lot of effort in getting WebKit to work has been avoiding its
> usage of the Foundation newer networking APIs (NSURLSession,
> NSURLDownload...). Does anyone plan on implementing them relatively
> soon?
> 
> I believe I can get WK to work using the libsoup networking backend
> the GTK port uses, but on the medium-term it'd be nice to be able to
> use this part of the Mac port as well. Otherwise, it's a really handy
> API I really liked using in my newer applications.
> 
> If nobody has a plan/interest in working on that, I might take it up
> some time from now.

I don't know of any plans to implement the recent networking APIs (perhaps 
because most code works fine with the existing APIs), but it would be really 
good to have them working for use by newer apps/frameworks.

My knowledge of the new APIs is minimal, but as far as I can tell the basic 
HTTP/HTTPS network code doesn't much change/improve on what's already in base, 
but the way the new API classes are structured to interact with each other is a 
big improvement in flexibility for things like caching data, pooling low level 
network connections to allow connection re-use, and managing authentication and 
proxies.
So while it's probably not possible to implement the new APIs on top of the old 
ones, it may well be possible to do much of the implementation copying/reusing 
existing code.
The exception would be HTTP/2 ... the old APIs don't do it at all, so that part 
of the networking code would need to be implemented either from scratch or on 
top of a reliable, portable, LGPL compatible free software library to do it (if 
such a thing exists).

I think it would be great if you could implement the new APIs.