billywhizz/node-httpclient

a http client for node.js that handles https, cookies and gzip compression

A simple to use (hopefully) http client for the node.js platform. 
It adds easy control of HTTPS, gzip compression and cookie handling 
to the basic http functionality provided by node.js http library.

Dependencies:
- if you want to use gzip you will need the node-compress module
  built and available in the lib directory (or the same directory 
  as httpclient.js). node-compress is here:
  
  http://github.com/waveto/node-compress
  
Todo:
	- better Error handling
	- full set of http client tests to compare with other http clients
	  (e.g. libcurl, libwww, winhttp)
	- handle all cookies correctly according to RFC
	- allow saving and restoring of cookies 
	- handle gzip encoding from client to server (should be simple)
	- allow specification of timeouts for connection and response
	- allow explicit closing of connection
	- allow option to automatically follow redirects (should be a simple change)
	- property content handling (binary, text encodings etc) based on http headers
	- handle http expiration headers and cacheing policies
	- handle head, put and delete requests
	etc, etc, etc...
	
Note:
	- currently, the httpclient object will only allow one request at a time
	  for a given protocol and host name (e.g. http://www.google.com). this
	  behaviour is handled in http.js where requests get queued up and executed
	  in sequence. if you want to send parallel requests to the same site, then
	  create a new httpclient object for each of the parallel requests. Am not
	  sure whether this is the correct behaviour but it seems to work well for 
	  what i need right now. 
	
Usage:

(see example.js) 

var sys = require("sys");
var httpcli = require("./httpclient");

var url = "http://www.betfair.com";
var surl = "https://www.betfair.com";

function verifyTLS(request) {
	sys.puts(sys.inspect(request));
	return true;
}

var client = new httpcli.httpclient();	

// a simple http request with default options (gzip off, keepalive off, https off)
client.perform(url, "GET", function(result) {
	sys.puts(sys.inspect(result));
}, null);

var client2 = new httpcli.httpclient();

// nested calls with gzip compression and keep-alive
client2.perform(url, "GET", function(result) {
	sys.puts(sys.inspect(result));
	client2.perform(url, "GET", function(result) {
		sys.puts(sys.inspect(result));
		// https request with callback handling of certificate validation
		client2.perform(surl, "GET", function(result) {
			sys.puts(sys.inspect(result));
		}, null, {"Accept-Encoding" : "none,gzip", "Connection" : "close"}, verifyTLS);
	}, null, {"Accept-Encoding" : "none,gzip", "Connection" : "Keep-Alive"});
}, null, {"Accept-Encoding" : "none,gzip", "Connection" : "Keep-Alive"});