JEP 321: HTTP Client (Standard)

[Alan Bateman]

On 04/12/2017 21:56, David Lloyd wrote:
> :
> I've had opportunity to give feedback, perhaps, though the API always
> seemed incomplete.  At least nobody (that I saw) sent out a message
> saying "Here it is, it's all done, what do you think?".  I've
> certainly never had opportunity to try it out: given its status as an
> incubating module present only in OpenJDK, the only people who are
> really in a position to try it out are those using OpenJDK (as opposed
> to other JDKs) with the flexibility to rewrite their use case if and
> when the API changes status (being integrated or disappearing) or form
> (evolving, presumably as a response to feedback), or people writing
> throwaway applications for the sole purpose of testing this particular
> API.  But those who are best able to make this kind of determination
> are those who need to be able to immediately use the API, and rely
> upon it indefinitely (for good or bad), which is definitely not the
> case for anything incubated in the OpenJDK project.
Incubator modules (JEP 11) is the means to get non-final APIs and 
features into the hands of developers. In this case, the HTTP client was 
an incubator module in JDK 9 and is proposed to continue (with a new 
implementation and some API refinements [1]) as an incubator module in 
JDK 10. So there has been lots of time to try out the API, send 
feedback, contribute, etc. Yes, the onus is on interested developers to 
get involved and there has been useful feedback on this mailing mail. If 
you read JEP 11 then you'll know that an API or feature can't stay in 
the incubator forever, it either moves forever or it is removed. In this 
case, the API has been through numerous iterations and is looking quite 
good, hence JEP 321 proposes to move it forward so that it can be 
promoted to a platform module.

-Alan.

[1] http://mail.openjdk.java.net/pipermail/net-dev/2017-November/011017.html