Tag Archives: SPDY

Firefox, Network, Web

1,000,000 sites run HTTP/2

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… out of the top ten million sites that is. So there’s at least that many, quite likely a few more.

This is according to w3techs who runs checks daily. Over the last few months, there have been about 50,000 new sites per month switching it on.

ht2-10-percent

It also shows that the HTTP/2 ratio has increased from a little over 1% deployment a year ago to the 10% today.

HTTP/2 gets more used the more  popular site it is. Among the top 1,000 sites on the web, more than 20% of them use HTTP/2. HTTP/2 also just recently (September 9) overcame SPDY among the top-1000 most popular sites.

h2-sep28

On September 7, Amazon announced their CloudFront service having enabled HTTP/2, which could explain an adoption boost over the last few days. New CloudFront users get it enabled by default but existing users actually need to go in and click a checkbox to make it happen.

As the web traffic of the world is severely skewed toward the top ones, we can be sure that a significantly larger share than 10% of the world’s HTTPS traffic is using version 2.

Recent usage stats in Firefox shows that HTTP/2 is used in half of all its HTTPS requests!

http2

Mozilla, Network, Open Source, Web

RFC 7540 is HTTP/2

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HTTP/2 is the new protocol for the web, as I trust everyone reading my blog are fully aware of by now. (If you’re not, read http2 explained.)

Today RFC 7540 was published, the final outcome of the years of work put into this by the tireless heroes in the HTTPbis working group of the IETF. Closely related to the main RFC is the one detailing HPACK, which is the header compression algorithm used by HTTP/2 and that is now known as RFC 7541.

The IETF part of this journey started pretty much with Mike Belshe’s posting of draft-mbelshe-httpbis-spdy-00 in February 2012. Google’s SPDY effort had been going on for a while and when it was taken to the httpbis working group in IETF, where a few different proposals on how to kick off the HTTP/2 work were debated.

HTTP team working in LondonThe first “httpbis’ified” version of that document (draft-ietf-httpbis-http2-00) was then published on November 28 2012 and the standardization work began for real. HTTP/2 was of course discussed a lot on the mailing list since the start, on the IETF meetings but also in interim meetings around the world.

In Zurich, in January 2014 there was one that I only attended remotely. We had the design team meeting in London immediately after IETF89 (March 2014) in the Mozilla offices just next to Piccadilly Circus (where I took the photos that are shown in this posting). We had our final in-person meetup with the HTTP team at Google’s offices in NYC in June 2014 where we ironed out most of the remaining issues.

In between those two last meetings I published my first version of http2 explained. My attempt at a lengthy and very detailed description of HTTP/2, including describing problems with HTTP/1.1 and motivations for HTTP/2. I’ve since published eleven updates.

HTTP team in London, debating protocol detailsThe last draft update of HTTP/2 that contained actual changes of the binary format was draft-14, published in July 2014. After that, the updates were in the language and clarifications on what to do when. There are some functional changes (added in -16 I believe) for like when which sort of frames are accepted that changes what a state machine should do, but it doesn’t change how the protocol looks on the wire.

RFC 7540 was published on May 15th, 2015

I’ve truly enjoyed having had the chance to be a part of this. There are a bunch of good people who made this happen and while I am most certainly forgetting key persons, some of the peeps that have truly stood out are: Mark, Julian, Roberto, Roy, Will, Tatsuhiro, Patrick, Martin, Mike, Nicolas, Mike, Jeff, Hasan, Herve and Willy.

http2 logo

Mozilla, Network, Web

The state and rate of HTTP/2 adoption

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http2 logoThe protocol HTTP/2 as defined in the draft-17 was approved by the IESG and is being implemented and deployed widely on the Internet today, even before it has turned up as an actual RFC. Back in February, already upwards 5% or maybe even more of the web traffic was using HTTP/2.

My prediction: We’ll see >10% usage by the end of the year, possibly as much as 20-30% a little depending on how fast some of the major and most popular platforms will switch (Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, Yahoo and others). In 2016 we might see HTTP/2 serve a majority of all HTTP requests – done by browsers at least.

Counted how? Yeah the second I mention a rate I know you guys will start throwing me hard questions like exactly what do I mean. What is Internet and how would I count this? Let me express it loosely: the share of HTTP requests (by volume of requests, not by bandwidth of data and not just counting browsers). I don’t know how to measure it and we can debate the numbers in December and I guess we can all end up being right depending on what we think is the right way to count!

Who am I to tell? I’m just a person deeply interested in protocols and HTTP/2, so I’ve been involved in the HTTP work group for years and I also work on several HTTP/2 implementations. You can guess as well as I, but this just happens to be my blog!

The HTTP/2 Implementations wiki page currently lists 36 different implementations. Let’s take a closer look at the current situation and prospects in some areas.

Browsers

Firefox and Chome have solid support since a while back. Just use a recent version and you’re good.

Internet Explorer has been shown in a tech preview that spoke HTTP/2 fine. So, run that or wait for it to ship in a public version soon.

There are no news about this from Apple regarding support in Safari. Give up on them and switch over to a browser that keeps up!

Other browsers? Ask them what they do, or replace them with a browser that supports HTTP/2 already.

My estimate: By the end of 2015 the leading browsers with a market share way over 50% combined will support HTTP/2.

Server software

Apache HTTPd is still the most popular web server software on the planet. mod_h2 is a recent module for it that can speak HTTP/2 – still in “alpha” state. Give it time and help out in other ways and it will pay off.

Nginx has told the world they’ll ship HTTP/2 support by the end of 2015.

IIS was showing off HTTP/2 in the Windows 10 tech preview.

H2O is a newcomer on the market with focus on performance and they ship with HTTP/2 support since a while back already.

nghttp2 offers a HTTP/2 => HTTP/1.1 proxy (and lots more) to front your old server with and can then help you deploy HTTP/2 at once.

Apache Traffic Server supports HTTP/2 fine. Will show up in a release soon.

Also, netty, jetty and others are already on board.

HTTPS initiatives like Let’s Encrypt, helps to make it even easier to deploy and run HTTPS on your own sites which will smooth the way for HTTP/2 deployments on smaller sites as well. Getting sites onto the TLS train will remain a hurdle and will be perhaps the single biggest obstacle to get even more adoption.

My estimate: By the end of 2015 the leading HTTP server products with a market share of more than 80% of the server market will support HTTP/2.

Proxies

Squid works on HTTP/2 support.

HAproxy? I haven’t gotten a straight answer from that team, but Willy Tarreau has been actively participating in the HTTP/2 work all the time so I expect them to have work in progress.

While very critical to the protocol, PHK of the Varnish project has said that Varnish will support it if it gets traction.

My estimate: By the end of 2015, the leading proxy software projects will start to have or are already shipping HTTP/2 support.

Services

Google (including Youtube and other sites in the Google family) and Twitter have ran HTTP/2 enabled for months already.

Lots of existing services offer SPDY today and I would imagine most of them are considering and pondering on how to switch to HTTP/2 as Chrome has already announced them going to drop SPDY during 2016 and Firefox will also abandon SPDY at some point.

My estimate: By the end of 2015 lots of the top sites of the world will be serving HTTP/2 or will be working on doing it.

Content Delivery Networks

Akamai plans to ship HTTP/2 by the end of the year. Cloudflare have stated that they “will support HTTP/2 once NGINX with it becomes available“.

Amazon has not given any response publicly that I can find for when they will support HTTP/2 on their services.

Not a totally bright situation but I also believe (or hope) that as soon as one or two of the bigger CDN players start to offer HTTP/2 the others might feel a bigger pressure to follow suit.

Non-browser clients

curl and libcurl support HTTP/2 since months back, and the HTTP/2 implementations page lists available implementations for just about all major languages now. Like node-http2 for javascript, http2-perl, http2 for Go, Hyper for Python, OkHttp for Java, http-2 for Ruby and more. If you do HTTP today, you should be able to switch over to HTTP/2 relatively easy.

More?

I’m sure I’ve forgotten a few obvious points but I might update this as we go as soon as my dear readers point out my faults and mistakes!

How long is HTTP/1.1 going to be around?

My estimate: HTTP 1.1 will be around for many years to come. There is going to be a double-digit percentage share of the existing sites on the Internet (and who knows how many that aren’t even accessible from the Internet) for the foreseeable future. For technical reasons, for philosophical reasons and for good old we’ll-never-touch-it-again reasons.

The survey

Finally, I asked friends on twitter, G+ and Facebook what they think the HTTP/2 share would be by the end of 2015 with the help of a little poll. This does of course not make it into any sound or statistically safe number but is still just a collection of what a set of random people guessed. A quick poll to get a rough feel. This is how the 64 responses I received were distributed:

http2 share at end of 2015

Evidently, if you take a median out of these results you can see that the middle point is between 5-10 and 10-15. I’ll make it easy and say that the poll showed a group estimate on 10%. Ten percent of the total HTTP traffic to be HTTP/2 at the end of 2015.

I didn’t vote here but I would’ve checked the 15-20 choice, thus a fair bit over the median but only slightly into the top quarter..

In plain numbers this was the distribution of the guesses:

0-5% 29.1% (19)
5-10% 21.8% (13)
10-15% 14.5% (10)
15-20% 10.9% (7)
20-25% 9.1% (6)
25-30% 3.6% (2)
30-40% 3.6% (3)
40-50% 3.6% (2)
more than 50% 3.6% (2)

Firefox, Mozilla, Web

Stricter HTTP 1.1 framing good bye

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I worked on a patch for Firefox bug 237623 to make sure Firefox would use a stricter check for “HTTP 1.1 framing”, checking that Content-Length is correct and that there’s no broken chunked encoding pieces. I was happy to close an over 10 years old bug when the fix landed in June 2014.

The fix landed and has not caused any grief all the way since June through to the actual live release (Nightlies, Aurora, Beta etc). This change finally shipped in Firefox 33 and I had more or less already started to forget about it, and now things went south really fast.

The amount of broken servers ended up too massive for us and we had to backpedal. The largest amount of problems can be split up in these two categories:

  1. Servers that deliver gzipped content and sends a Content-Length: for the uncompressed data. This seems to be commonly done with old mod_deflate and mod_fastcgi versions on Apache, but we also saw people using IIS reporting this symptom.
  2. Servers that deliver chunked-encoding but who skip the final zero-size chunk so that the stream actually never really ends.

We recognize that not everyone can have the servers fixed – even if all these servers should still be fixed! We now make these HTTP 1.1 framing problems get detected but only cause a problem if a certain pref variable is set (network.http.enforce-framing.http1), and since that is disabled by default they will be silently ignored much like before. The Internet is a more broken and more sad place than I want to accept at times.

We haven’t fully worked out how to also make the download manager (ie the thing that downloads things directly to disk, without showing it in the browser) happy, which was the original reason for bug 237623…

Although the code may now no longer alert anything about HTTP 1.1 framing problems, it will now at least mark the connection not due for re-use which will be a big boost compared to before since these broken framing cases really hurt persistent connections use. The partial transfer return codes for broken SPDY and HTTP/2 transfers remain though and I hope to be able to remain stricter with these newer protocols.

This partial reversion will land ASAP and get merged into patch releases of Firefox 33 and later.

Finally, to top this off. Here’s a picture of an old HTTP 1.1 frame so that you know what we’re talking about.

An old http1.1 frame

Mozilla, Network, Open Source, Web

Changing networks with Firefox running

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Short recap: I work on network code for Mozilla. Bug 939318 is one of “mine” – yesterday I landed a fix (a patch series with 6 individual patches) for this and I wanted to explain what goodness that should (might?) come from this!

diffstat

diffstat reports this on the complete patch series:

29 files changed, 920 insertions(+), 162 deletions(-)

The change set can be seen in mozilla-central here. But I guess a proper description is easier for most…

The bouncy road to inclusion

This feature set and associated problems with it has been one of the most time consuming things I’ve developed in recent years, I mean in relation to the amount of actual code produced. I’ve had it “landed” in the mozilla-inbound tree five times and yanked out again before it landed correctly (within a few hours), every time of course reverted again because I had bugs remaining in there. The bugs in this have been really tricky with a whole bunch of timing-dependent and race-like problems and me being unfamiliar with a large part of the code base that I’m working on. It has been a highly frustrating journey during periods but I’d like to think that I’ve learned a lot about Firefox internals partly thanks to this resistance.

As I write this, it has not even been 24 hours since it got into m-c so there’s of course still a risk there’s an ugly bug or two left, but then I also hope to fix the pending problems without having to revert and re-apply the whole series…

Many ways to connect to networks

Firefox Nightly screenshotIn many network setups today, you get an environment and a network “experience” that is crafted for that particular place. For example you may connect to your work over a VPN where you get your company DNS and you can access sites and services you can’t even see when you connect from the wifi in your favorite coffee shop. The same thing goes for when you connect to that captive portal over wifi until you realize you used the wrong SSID and you switch over to the access point you were supposed to use.

For every one of these setups, you get different DHCP setups passed down and you get a new DNS server and so on.

These days laptop lids are getting closed (and the machine is put to sleep) at one place to be opened at a completely different location and rarely is the machine rebooted or the browser shut down.

Switching between networks

Switching from one of the networks to the next is of course something your operating system handles gracefully. You can even easily be connected to multiple ones simultaneously like if you have both an Ethernet card and wifi.

Enter browsers. Or in this case let’s be specific and talk about Firefox since this is what I work with and on. Firefox – like other browsers – will cache images, it will cache DNS responses, it maintains connections to sites a while even after use, it connects to some sites even before you “go there” and so on. All in the name of giving the users an as good and as fast experience as possible.

The combination of keeping things cached and alive, together with the fact that switching networks brings new perspectives and new “truths” offers challenges.

Realizing the situation is new

The changes are not at all mind-bending but are basically these three parts:

  1. Make sure that we detect network changes, even if just the set of available interfaces change. Send an event for this.
  2. Make sure the necessary parts of the code listens and understands this “network topology changed” event and acts on it accordingly
  3. Consider coming back from “sleep” to be a network changed event since we just cannot be sure of the network situation anymore.

The initial work has been made for Windows only but it allows us to smoothen out any rough edges before we continue and make more platforms support this.

The network changed event can be disabled by switching off the new “network.notify.changed” preference. If you do end up feeling a need for that, I really hope you file a bug explaining the details so that we can work on fixing it!

Act accordingly

So what is acting properly? What if the network changes in a way so that your active connections suddenly can’t be used anymore due to the new rules and routing and what not? We attack this problem like this: once we get a “network changed” event, we “allow” connections to prove that they are still alive and if not they’re torn down and re-setup when the user tries to reload or whatever. For plain old HTTP(S) this means just seeing if traffic arrives or can be sent off within N seconds, and for websockets, SPDY and HTTP2 connections it involves sending an actual ping frame and checking for a response.

The internal DNS cache was a bit tricky to handle. I initially just flushed all entries but that turned out nasty as I then also killed ongoing name resolves that caused errors to get returned. Now I instead added logic that flushes all the already resolved names and it makes names “in transit” to get resolved again so that they are done on the (potentially) new network that then can return different addresses for the same host name(s).

This should drastically reduce the situation that could happen before when Firefox would basically just freeze and not want to do any requests until you closed and restarted it. (Or waited long enough for other timeouts to trigger.)

The ‘N seconds’ waiting period above is actually 5 seconds by default and there’s a new preference called “network.http.network-changed.timeout” that can be altered at will to allow some experimentation regarding what the perfect interval truly is for you.

Firefox BallInitially on Windows only

My initial work has been limited to getting the changed event code done for the Windows back-end only (since the code that figures out if there’s news on the network setup is highly system specific), and now when this step has been taken the plan is to introduce the same back-end logic to the other platforms. The code that acts on the event is pretty much generic and is mostly in place already so it is now a matter of making sure the event can be generated everywhere.

My plan is to start on Firefox OS and then see if I can assist with the same thing in Firefox on Android. Then finally Linux and Mac.

I started on Windows since Windows is one of the platforms with the largest amount of Firefox users and thus one of the most prioritized ones.

More to do

There’s separate work going on for properly detecting captive portals. You know the annoying things hotels and airports for example tend to have to force you to do some login dance first before you are allowed to use the internet at that location. When such a captive portal is opened up, that should probably qualify as a network change – but it isn’t yet.

cURL and libcurl, Haxx, Network, Open Source, Web

I go Mozilla

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Mozilla dinosaur head logo

In January 2014, I start working for Mozilla

I’ve worked in open source projects for some 20 years and I’ve maintained curl and libcurl for over 15 years. I’m an internet protocol geek at heart and Mozilla seems like a perfect place for me to continue to explore this interest of mine and combine it with real open source in its purest form.

I plan to use my experiences from all my years of protocol fiddling and making stuff work on different platforms against random server implementations into the networking team at Mozilla and work on improving Firefox and more.

I’m putting my current embedded Linux focus to the side and I plunge into a worldwide known company with worldwide known brands to do open source within the internet protocols I enjoy so much. I’ll be working out of my home, just outside Stockholm Sweden. Mozilla has no office in my country and I have no immediate plans of moving anywhere (with a family, kids and all established here).

I intend to bring my mindset on protocols and how to do things well into the Mozilla networking stack and world and I hope and expect that I will get inspiration and input from Mozilla and take that back and further improve curl over time. My agreement with Mozilla also gives me a perfect opportunity to increase my commitment to curl and curl development. I want to maintain and possibly increase my involvement in IETF and the httpbis work with http2 and related stuff. With one foot in Firefox and one in curl going forward, I think I may have a somewhat unique position and attitude toward especially HTTP.

I’ve not yet met another Swedish Mozillian but I know I’m not the only one located in Sweden. I guess I now have a reason to look them up and say hello when suitable.

Björn and Linus will continue to drive and run Haxx with me taking a step back into the shadows (Haxx-wise). I’ll still be part of the collective Haxx just as I was for many years before I started working full-time for Haxx in 2009. My email address, my sites etc will remain on haxx.se.

I’m looking forward to 2014!

cURL and libcurl, Development, Open Source, Web

The curl year 2012

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2012

So what did happen in the curl project during 2012?

First some basic stats

We shipped 6 releases with 199 identified bug fixes and some 40 other changes. That makes on average 33 bug fixes shipped every 61st day or a little over one bug fix done every second day. All this done with about 1000 commits to the git repository, which is roughly the same amount of git activity as 2010 and 2011. We merged commits from 72 different authors, which is a slight increase from the 62 in 2010 and 68 in 2011.

On our main development mailing list, the curl-library list, we now have 1300 subscribers and during 2012 it got about 3500 postings from almost 500 different From addresses. To no surprise, I posted by far the largest amount of mails there (847) with the number two poster being Günter Knauf who posted 151 times. Four more members posted more than 100 times: Steve Holme (145), Dan Fandrich (131), Marc Hoersken (130) and Yang Tse (107). Last year I sent 1175 mails to the same list…

Notable events

I’ve walked through the biggest changes and fixes and here are the particular ones I found stood out during this otherwise rather calm and laid back curl year. Possibly in a rough order of importance…

  1. We started the year with two security vulnerability announcements, regarding an SSL weakness and an injection flaw. They were reported in 2011 though and we didn’t get any further security alerts during 2012 which I think is good. Or a sign that nobody has been looking close enough…
  2. We got two interesting additions in the SSL backend department almost simultaneously. We got native Windows support with the use of the schannel subsystem and we got native Mac OS X support with the use of Darwin SSL. Thanks to these, we can now offer SSL-enabled libcurls on those operating systems without relying on third party SSL libraries.
  3. The VERIFYHOST debacle took off with “security researchers” throwing accusations and insults, ending with us releasing a curl release with the bug removed. It did however unfortunately lead to some follow-up problems in for example the PHP binding.
  4. During the autumn, the brokeness of WSApoll was identified, and we now build libcurl without it and as a result libcurl now works better on Windows!
  5. In an attempt to allow libcurl-using applications to avoid select() and its problems, we introduced the new public function curl_multi_wait. It avoids the FD_SETSIZE limit and makes it harder to screw up…
  6. The overly bloated User-Agent string for the curl tool was dramatically shortened when we cut out all the subsystems/libraries and their version numbers from the string. Now there’s only curl and its version number left. Nice and clean.
  7. In July we finally introduced metalink support in the curl tool with the curl 7.27.0 release. It’s been one of those things we’ve discussed for ages that finally came through and became reality.
  8. With the brand new HTTP CONNECT support in the test suite we suddenly could get much improved test cases that does SSL or just tunnel through an HTTP proxy with the CONNECT request. It of course helps us avoid regressions and otherwise improve curl and libcurl.

What didn’t happen

  1. I made an attempt to get the spindly hacking going, but I’ve mostly failed with that effort. I have personally not had enough time and energy to work on it, and the interest from the rest of the world seems luke warm at best.
  2. HTTP pipelining. Linus Nielsen Feltzing has a patch series in the works with a much improved pipelining support for libcurl. I’ll write a separate post about it once it gets in. Obviously we failed to merge it before the end of the year.
  3. Some of my friends like to mock me about curl not being completely IPv6 friendly due to its lack of support for Happy Eyeballs, and of course they’re right. Making curl just do two connects on IPv6-enabled machines should be a fairly small change but yet I haven’t yet managed to get into actually implementing it…
  4. DANE is SSL cert verification with records from DNS thanks to DNSSEC. Firefox has some experiments going and Chrome already supports it. This is a technology that truly can improve HTTPS going forwards and allow us to avoid the annoyingly weak and broken CA model…

I won’t promise that any of these will happen during 2013 but I can promise there will be efforts…

The Future

I wrote a separate post a short while ago about the HTTP2 progress, and I expect 2013 to bring much more details and discussions in that area. Will we get SRV record support soon? Or perhaps even URI records? Will some of the recent discussions about new HTTP auth schemes develop into something that will reach the internet in the coming year?

In libcurl we will switch to an internal design that is purely non-blocking with a lot of if-then-that-else source code removed for checks which interface that is used. I’ll make a follow-up post with details about that as well as soon as it actually happens.

Our Responsibility

curl and libcurl are considered pillars in the internet world by now. This year I’ve heard from several places by independent sources how people consider support by curl to be an important driver for internet technology. As long as we don’t have it, it hasn’t really reached everyone and that things won’t get adopted for real in the Internet community until curl has it supported. As father of the project it makes me proud and humble, but I also feel the responsibility of making sure that we continue to do the right thing the right way.

I also realize that this position of ours is not automatically glued to us, we need to keep up the good stuff to make it stick.

cURL

cURL and libcurl, Web

HTTP2, SPDY and spindly right now

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SPDYOn November 28, the HTTPbis group within the IETF published the first draft for the upcoming HTTP2 protocol. What is being posted now is a start and a foundation for further discussions and changes. It is basically an import of the SPDY version 3 protocol draft.

There’s been a lot of resistance within the HTTPbis to the mandated TLS that SPDY has been promoting so far and it seems unlikely to reach a consensus as-is. There’s also been a lot of discussion and debate over the compression SPDY uses. Not only because of the pre-populated dictionary that might already be a little out of date or the fact that gzip compression consumes a notable amount of memory per stream, but also recently the security aspect to compression thanks to the CRIME attack.

Meanwhile, the discussions on the spdy development list have brought up several changes to the version 3 that are suggested and planned to become part of the version 4 that is work in progress. Including a new compression algorithm, shorter length fields (now 16bit) and more. Recently discussions have brought up a need for better flexibility when it comes to prioritization and especially changing prio run-time. For like when browser users switch tabs or simply scroll down the page and you rather have the images you have in sight to load before the images you no longer have in view…

I started my work on Spindly a little over a year ago to build a stand-alone library, primarily intended for libcurl so that we could soon offer SPDY downloads for it. We’re still only on SPDY protocol 2 there and I’ve failed to attract any fellow developers to the project and my own lack of time has basically made the project not evolve the way I wanted it to. I haven’t given up on it though. I hope to be able to get back to it eventually, very much also depending on how the HTTPbis talk goes. I certainly am determined to have libcurl be part of the upcoming HTTP2 experiments (even if that is not happening very soon) and spindly might very well be the infrastructure that powers libcurl then.

We’ll see…

Open Source

The first month of Spindly

Let me entertain you with some info and updates from the Spindly project. (Unfortunately we don’t have any logo yet so I don’t get to show it off here.)

Since I announced my intention to proceed and write the SPDY library on my own instead of waiting for libspdy to get back to life, I have worked on a number of infrastructure details.

I converted the build to use autotools and libtool to help us really make it a portable library. I made all test cases run without memory leaks and this took some amount of changes of libspdy since it was clearly not written with carefully checking memory and there were also a lot of unnecessarily small mallocs(). Anyone who does malloc() of 8 bytes should reconsider what they’re doing.

Since I’ve had to bugfix the libspdy so much, change structs and APIs and add new functions that were missing I decided that there’s no point in us trying to keep the original libspdy code or code style intact anymore so I’ve re-indented the whole code base to a style I like better than the original style.

I’ve started to write the fundamentals of a client and server demo application that is meant to use the Spindly API to implement both sides. They don’t really do much yet but the basics are in place. I’ve worked more on my idea of what the spindly API should look like. I’ve written the code for a few functions from that API and I’ve also added a few tests for them.

Most of this work has been made by me and me alone with no particular feedback or help by others. I continue to push my changes to github without delay and I occasionally announce stuff on the mailing list to keep interested people up to date. Hopefully this will lead to someone else joining in sooner or later.

The progress has not been very fast, not only because I’ve had to do a lot of thinking about how the API should ideally work to be really useful, but also because I have quite a lot of commitments in other open source projects (primarily curl and libssh2) that require their amount of time, not to mention that my day job of course needs proper attention.

We offer a daily snapshot of the code if you can’t use or don’t want to use git.

Upcoming

I intend to add more functions from the API document, one by one and test cases for each as I go along. In parallel I hope to get the demo client and server to run so that the API proves to actually work properly.

I want the demo client and server also to allow them to run interop tests against other implementations and I want them to be able to speak SPDY with SSL switched off – for debugging reasons. Later on, I hope to be able to use the demo server in the curl test suite so that I can test that the curl SPDY integration works correctly.

We need to either fix “check” (the unit test suite) to work C89 compatible or replace it with something else.

Want to help?

If you want to help, please subscribe to the mailing list, get familiar with the code base, study the API doc and see if it makes sense to you and then help me get that API turned into code…