Open Thread: Your Pet Peeves

I'm writing this post to ask potential users of the C++ Network Library what their worst experiences are with existing networking libraries, and what you'd want to see (or not see) in a new network library. I personally have my motivation for working on a new network library in C++ because of past (and present) experiences. These personal motivations are already pretty much documented in the rationale for the library (and the architecture document) but I'd like to know what people think should be the other goals of the C++ Network Library.

Currently, I'm focusing my time implementing an HTTP Client with the most features useful to me (and the new generation of web-aware software) that I'm having tunnel-vision as to what I'm supposed to be doing and how I'm supposed to be doing it. Knowing from the audience what they would want to see next would be a nice refresher to let the team know what sort of thing we should be working on in the project.

So what are your pet peeves (and/or worst experiences) with existing networking libraries that you want addressed in a new network library? Let us know!

HTTP 1.0 Implementation now in trunk!

Okay, this will be quick.

Yesterday I was able to come up with a really crude yet functional HTTP 1.0 client. This is already available in the subversion repository, and ready for more unit tests to make sure that we can cover more cases before shipping. Help would be definitely appreciated in terms of writing unit tests and refactoring/improving the URI parser and the client implementation.

More information to come in the next few days as I continue developing the HTTP implementation.

So if you have time to spare and brain cycles to donate, we'd definitely appreciate the help!

Software requirements

I've put up the beginnings of software requirements specification on the C++ Network wiki. I hope this could spark a bit of debate and we can make some more progress when its decided exactly what networking features we'd like to add to C++.

Networking in C++

In the interests of promoting discussion, and taking a cue from the success of Improving Boost Documents, this blog has been set up to show-case networking in C++, and to provide feedback for the cpp-netlib community.

The aim of cpp-netlib is to provide a library with clean, type-safe interface for networking using modern C++ techniques. Eventually, it is hoped that it will become a part of the Boost C++ Libraries.