Sawyer X via RT wrote:
Show quoted text>While you mention HTTP::Tiny in the POD, it's still unclear why this
>module was written. Was HTTP::Tiny lacking something?
HTTP::Tiny, like all the other HTTP clients on CPAN, has an awkward
interface, in that the caller has to explicitly check for errors.
I wanted something that I could use without usually having to write any
extra code for the error case.
Actually I wouldn't have written Net::HTTP::Tiny as an isolated project.
It was an afterthought following Net::FTP::Tiny. Previously I'd done
FTP using either LWP or Net::FTP. LWP is of course very heavy, and has
Perl-version portability issues, so I wanted something reasonably light
and portable. Net::FTP is better in those respects, but hideous to
drive for the simple case: creating the connection, changing directory,
setting mode, and so on, all have to be done explicitly in procedural
code, each with their own error checking. I wanted something that could
be driven from a URL, as LWP can be.
Hence Net::FTP::Tiny: lightweight (much lighter even than Net::FTP)
and with URL-based control. Once I was writing that, I was inclined
to make it nice in other ways. I made it signal errors as exceptions,
unlike both LWP and Net::FTP. I made the error messages stylistically
consistent and consistently useful, which is an area where Net::FTP lacks.
I made it IPv6 capable, unlike Net::FTP (and LWP uses Net::FTP underneath
so suffers the same problem).
So having written that, I realised that although the original motivations
behind it didn't apply to HTTP, I'd rather like to have those ancillary
benefits with HTTP. So I wrote Net::HTTP::Tiny with a parallel structure
(much of the URL-parsing code is just copied across). Its wins relative
to HTTP::Tiny are errors as exceptions, consistent error messages,
and IPv6 capability. It's also slightly tinier than HTTP::Tiny, but
not enough to make a selling point in itself.
But I don't really want to advertise this in the documentation. It would
be painfully close to a rant, and would appear to be denigrating
HTTP::Tiny, which I don't want to do. HTTP::Tiny is a nice module
for its intended use cases. I link to it as a "see also" on the basis
that it's the next module you should turn to if Net::HTTP::Tiny doesn't
have enough power, for example if you need to do a POST. The semantics
of the other two "see also"s are "lower level" and "same thing for a
different protocol". Net::FTP::Tiny has three "see also"s with the same
set of relationships.
-zefram
