Re: Loading a website with GNUstep (authentication)

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On Saturday, May 11, 2002, at 03:40 PM, Fabien VALLON wrote:

> maybye a port of : http://curlhandle.sourceforge.net/
> could be intersting.
> But it seems to use Carbon :-(
>
> see : http://curl.haxx.se/libcurl/ too

A libcurl based NSURLHandle implementation could easily support all the 
url schemes
supported by libcurl (GNUstep currently supports http, http, and file), 
but libcurl is
designed for synchronous I/O

The problem with that is it uses threads for background loads ... so
it's pretty inefficient.  The GNUstep base code doesn't have that 
limitation.

I try very hard to ensure that GNUstep has all the functionality, 
without the
need to use threading - so people can write fully functional 
single-threaded
applications.  Apart from the performance benefit of single threaded apps
(no locking required), they are *much* easier to debug.

Also, it's good to try to keep the number of external libraries that 
GNUstep
depends upon to a minimum, so I'd rather not use libcurl ...
It would be nice if someone could contribute implementations of other 
schemes
(actually, ftp is the important one) which worked using NSFileHandle and
asynchronous I/O.