Make dart:io.HttpConnection public

[justinfagnani]

HttpConnection is useful outside of HttpServer, for example when negotiating the handshake of a WebSocket connection.

Here's a rough sketch of code that worked with the http server when it was part of the chat sample:

server = new ServerSocket("127.0.0.1", 8888, 0);
server.connectionHandler = (Socket socket) {

  // setup an HTTPConnection for the WebSocket handshake
  HttpConnection httpConnection = new HttpConnection(socket);
  httpConnection.requestReceived = (HttpRequest request, HttpResponse response) {
    response.statusCode = HttpStatus.SWITCHING_PROTOCOLS;
    response.setHeader("Connection", "Upgrade");
    response.setHeader("Upgrade", "WebSocket");
    response.setHeader("Sec-WebSocket-Accept", makeWebSocketAccept(request.headers["sec-websocket-key"]));
  
    // remove HttpConnection's handlers and add our own
    socket.dataHandler = () { ... }
  }
}

HttpParser and HttpUtils would be useful as well.

[sgjesse]

The HttpConnection class was made private by design for handling the internal HTTP connection state. That said of cause we need to support things like WebSockets, but it should be build into the current public interface. Maybe something like this:

interface HttpServer {
  ...

  // For handling WebSocket requests.
  onWebSocketConnect(HttpWebSocketConnection connection)

  // For handling non-websockets upgrade requests. Should provide a mechanism
  // for getting control of the actual socket.
  onUpgrade(...)
}

For experimenting you can always copy the HTTP code from runtime/bin. It is currently all Dart and should run without problems as such.

For HttpParser we have made it private as the implementation is subject to change. The parsing could become a performance bottleneck and something we would like to tune in various ways including moving from using Dart code to using C++ code.

For HttpUtils they are various internal helpers. Of cause some of the features are useful in other places, but thay need a better API design to be made public.

For HttpParser and HttpUtils it should be relatively easy to reuse the code by either copying it or #source from runtime/bin. This is what the tests tests/standalone/src/io/HttpParserTest.dart and tests/standalone/src/io/UrlEncodingTest.dart does.

I will mark this as "WontFix" and open two new bugs on supporting connection upgrade in general and on supporting web sockets in particular.

---

Added Area-IO, WontFix labels.

[sgjesse]

Created issues

http://code.google.com/p/dart/issues/detail?id=2001

http://code.google.com/p/dart/issues/detail?id=2002

for tracking this.

[kevmoo]

Removed Area-IO label.
Added Area-Library, Library-IO labels.