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HttpCore Overview

HttpCore is a set of low level HTTP transport components that can be used to build custom client and server side HTTP services with a minimal footprint. HttpCore supports two I/O models: blocking I/O model based on the classic Java I/O and non-blocking, event driven I/O model based on Java NIO.

Design objectives and project scope

  • Small footprint with no mandatory dependencies beyond JRE
  • Self-sufficient HTTP transport impmementation capable of executing message exchanges from any endpoint in the network topology (client, server, proxy)
  • Common message primitives, control interfaces and strategies shared by the client and server side protocol implementations
  • Consistent APIs for all supported HTTP protocol versions
  • HTTP protocol logic can be executed and tested against itself on the opposite endpoint
  • A foundation for Apache HttpClient
  • Potentially a foundation for an embeddable server similar in scope to Apache HttpClient

Documentation

  1. Guides

  2. Examples demonstrating some common as well as more complex use cases

  3. Javadocs

  4. API compatibility reports

Standards Compliance

HttpCore components strive to conform to the following specifications endorsed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and the internet at large:

  • RFC 9110 - HTTP Semantics
  • RFC 9112 - Hypertext Transfer Protocol Version 1.1 (HTTP/1.1)
  • RFC 9113 - Hypertext Transfer Protocol Version 2 (HTTP/2)
  • RFC 7541 - HPACK: Header Compression for HTTP/2
  • RFC 1945 - Hypertext Transfer Protocol – HTTP/1.0
  • RFC 2396 - Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI): Generic Syntax
  • RFC 9218 - Extensible Prioritization Scheme for HTTP