Re: [Httplib2-discuss] Feedback on httplib2

[Joe G. <joe...@gm...>]

Simon,
  Sorry for the slow response, I was out getting educated on
what it means to be an IBMer :)

   More comments inline:

On 7/25/06, Simon Willison <swi...@gm...> wrote:
> I've been playing with httplib2 and so far I like it - it sucks an
> awful lot less than the stuff in the standard library. That said,
> here are a few observations.
>
> 1. If you give it a URL to a site that is down / doesn't exist you
> get a low level socket error. It would be nice if this was a
> documented httplib2 exception.
>
>  >>> import httplib2
>  >>> httplib2.Http().request('http://non-existant-domain-oeu.com')
> Traceback (most recent call last):
>    File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
>    File "httplib2/__init__.py", line 781, in request
>      (response, content) = self._request(conn, authority, uri,
> request_uri, method, body, headers, redirections, cachekey)
>    File "httplib2/__init__.py", line 603, in _request
>      (response, content) = self._conn_request(conn, request_uri,
> method, body, headers)
>    File "httplib2/__init__.py", line 581, in _conn_request
>      conn.connect()
>    File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.3/lib/
> python2.3/httplib.py", line 535, in connect
>      socket.SOCK_STREAM):
> socket.gaierror: (7, 'No address associated with nodename')
>  >>>

Yup, that's a bug. Now logged.


> 2. I'm a little uncomfortable with the way authentication works - it
> seems like it would be very easy to add some credentials and then
> forget to clear them, potentially passing them to other sites as you
> reuse the Http() instance. I would prefer something like this:
>
> http = Http()
> http.add_credentials('https://del.icio.us/', 'username', 'password')
>
> That way the class knows to only send that username and password to
> URLs that start with https://del.icio.us/. Is there a reason this
> isn't done at the moment?

For the most part I thought that you would only be connecting to one
server, but I agree, this does have the possibility of leaking names
and passwords to other servers unintentionally. I like the solution
you suggested but would put the domain name as a last, and optional,
parameter. Logged as a feature request.

>
> 3. Finally, I ran in to a gotcha when doing a POST request: the
> service I was talking to required me to include a Content-Type:
> application/x-www-form-urlencoded header. It would be nice if one of
> the examples in the documentation showed this - it would have saved
> me quite a bit of debugging.
>
> On that last note, has any consideration been given to adding a
> convenience method for the common case where you wish to POST a
> dictionary of name/value pairs? Something like the following:
>
> http = Http()
> http.post_form(url, {'name': 'value'})
>
> The post_form method would run urllib.urlencode on the argument
> dictionary and automatically add the application/x-www-form-urlencode
> header.

Good idea, at the very least the docs need to be updated, I will need to
poke around at what url encoding functions already exist before deciding what to
add to httplib2. Logged as an enchancement request.

   Thanks,
   -joe

-- 
Joe Gregorio        http://bitworking.org