Re: [aerogear-dev] Android targetSDK and HTTP stack

As we are leaning towards Level 10 as our targetSDK for Aerogear 1.0.0 we should consider current usage of HttpClient. As Summers pointed out in #aerogear IRC, Google has deprecated the platform HttpClient library, and stopped patching it. Apache HTTP Client had been a lesser evil before, but has been deprecated with Gingerbread (Level 9 API), and java.net.HttpURLConnection has been bugfixed in later versions and made the preferred choice [1]. The JavaDoc in one of google-http-java-client library classes sums it up nicely [2]. We are currently using HttpClient in aerogear-android. To be future proof we should therefore move to java.net.HttpURLConnection. That API is one of those awkward early java APIs that isn't very nice to use. The big sore spot from backwards compatibility point of view is that HttpURLConnection had some ugly bugs in previous versions. Google for their part is developing google-http-java-client library mentioned above - it's a wrapper library that checks current runtime environment, and uses HttpClient underneath when API Level is less than 9, otherwise it uses HttpURLConnection. I haven't played enough with google-http-java-client to say we should use it. It comes with quite some dependencies, but those seem like optional, and it's possible that with the extent of functionality that we require the whole lib after proguard treatment can be squeezed to a really small size. But as I said, I need to play with it some more. Any thoughts welcome. [1] http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2011/09/androids-http-clients.html [2] https://code.google.com/p/google-http-java-client/source/browse/google-ht... - marko _______________________________________________ aerogear-dev mailing list aerogear-dev(a)lists.jboss.org https://lists.jboss.org/mailman/listinfo/aerogear-dev