[Haskell-cafe] HTTP client libraries

[Don Stewart]

paulrbrown+haskell-cafe:
> On Thu, Mar 27, 2008 at 12:08 PM, John Goerzen <jgoerzen at complete.org> wrote:
> >  * Bjorn's String-based HTTP
> >   It eats RAM.  Does not appear to read data lazily, returns a String,
> >   and may have a memory leak as well.  Does not appear to be suited
> >   for anything except very small file downloads.
> 
> Do you know why it's eating RAM?  With the issue with open sockets
> resolved (I know, I have to send that patch to Bjorn...), I haven't
> had observable stability or leaking issues.  I'm using it to hit
> JSON/XML services like Twitter, del.icio.us, Google reader, etc.
> 
> Laziness here is a bit of a mixed bag, since if you're too lazy,
> you'll try to read the stream after it's long gone.  (Principle of
> Least Surprise)
> 
> We do need a real (HTTPS, support for encoding, possibility to be
> lazy) HTTP client library, and a binding for libcurl may be the short
> path.

And we have a curl binding, already in wide use.

    http://code.haskell.org/curl.git/

a release to hackage is imminent.