[webkit-dev] WebKitGtk network backend

[Holger Freyther]

On Monday 29 December 2008 08:14:02 Paul Pedriana wrote:
>  FWIW, I rewrote our version of the networking back-end support to use a
> generic pure-virtual interface. That way all those #ifdefs in the code went
> away and the back-end requirements became clearer and easier to provide. We
> are using our own http/ftp/file support that is different from libsoup,
> curl, etc. An interesting result of this is that multiple back-ends can be
> simultaneously active; this allows one library to support ftp while another
> supports http in the case that you (like us) don't have a single library
> that does both. It also allows for a clean implementation of a disk cache,
> as a disk cache is merely an http handler that gets first shot at
> http-provided data. Another result is that custom URI schemes (e.g.
> blah://) can be transparently supported by applications, which is useful
> for custom platforms and uses such as ours.
>
>  Somebody a few weeks ago was talking about pure-virtual interfaces in
> WebKit, and while my response to him was one of caution in getting carried
> away with such interfaces, IMO this is a case where they are beneficial.
>

Everything right, but we talk about API design and the fundamental question is 
if we wrap a generic interface and make it more generic or if we just expose a 
handle to the library....

z.