What is the ‘best’ http library

So we want to add a http plugin in GStreamer which is desktop neutral.
I first wanted to use libsoup, but it will start depending on gconf soon, so unfortunatly that takes it of the table.

It seems to me that Curl and Neon are the two main options to build our plugin upon. My current idea is to go with Neon, but if anyone have some good arguments for Curl or something else, please let me know :)

8 thoughts on “What is the ‘best’ http library

  1. I don’t know about neon, but libcurl has the advantage of just eating everything you throw at it without complaining, is highly tunable and has a lot of bindings.

  2. Neon’s used in Subversion, where it has been reliable, platform neutral, and mostly bug-free.

  3. I don’t know about neon, but libcurl is very powerful, it can follow redirects, let you change the referer, supports HTTPS certificates, HTTP POST, HTTP PUT, HTTP form based upload, proxies, cookies, user+password authentication (Basic, Digest, NTLM, Negotiate, kerberos…), etc, and I think it’s more widely used than neon…

  4. Try GNet .

    I never used it myself (or any other HTTP library for that matter), but from the describtion on their web site it look very intersting.

    Just wanted to be sure you have all the options under your eyes.

  5. Regardless of which library you end up using, please make sure that it is able to read the system-wide defaults for things such as HTTP proxy address. This can include an automatic proxy configuration script or a list of “no proxy” hosts.

    There is nothing that is more annoying than configuring your network proxy in GNOME or KDE and then having to make spearate changes in other applications such as Mozilla. Especially when you are behind a corporate firewall that blocks or redirects your requests when you are not using one of the mandatory proxies.

Comments are closed.