Subject: Re: CONNECT command with message body

From: Patrick McManus <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 02 Jun 2009 15:42:40 -0400

On Mon, 2009-05-18 at 16:26 +1200, Adrien de Croy wrote:
> Jamie Lokier wrote:
> > Adrien de Croy wrote:

> > Disconnecting to signal the end of the body is only allowed for
> > responses.  For requests, it would need to be a TCP half-close and
> > that is not mentioned at all in HTTP, and probably not supported by
> > most/all servers.
> >
> >   
> that's the basis I've been operating under.  Was just wondering if it 
> were explictly prohibited by the spec or not.
> 
> Since I didn't want to presume there can be no application where it may 
> be valid to send an entity body in a request and then disconnect (i.e. 
> if not interested in the response).
> 

First, my apologies for responding to a two week old message. I'm just
getting to some mailing list folders - but I thought it was worth piping
up to offer some implementation experience.

I developed an embedded HTTP proxy for the SOA/SOAP world and one of our
customers did exactly as described above: generated HTTP requests that
were delimited by half-connection closes. I decided to make the
adjustment and support it when parsing requests, though of course it was
converted to something more conventional when sending the request
upstream.

At the time I decided it was legit. It had nothing to do with CONNECT
though.. it was probably POST.

So such things do in fact (uncommonly) exist with half closes.

Furthermore, there are exchange patterns in the SOA world where the
clients really do not care about the HTTP response. I'm thinking of
things like ws-messaging where any kind of ack comes back as another
message (a different HTTP request).. these things have their own acks,
timeouts, and retries built in (if you're not familiar, its kinda like
TCP over HTTP) and really don't care what the HTTP response is. I would
not be surprised to find one of those clients doing a full close to
delimit the request message - though I never saw it. (and I'm out of
that world now).

-Patrick.

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