Re: [servlet-dev] [jakartaee-platform-dev] What do we exactly dislike in

[Mark Thomas <markt@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On 13/07/2022 07:26, Greg Wilkins wrote:

<snip/>

To answer a much earlier question, Tomcat does not have an internal 
low-level HTTP API at the moment.

> So is there an appetite for a standardized low level HTTP API?   There 
> is definitely an appetite for low level HTTP APIs, but I'm not so sure 
> that we could find a single abstraction to suit everybody (other than 
> the jetty-12 one, which if course is perfect and all things to all 
> people).    Should it be async? Should it be blocking and based on Loom 
> virtual threads? Should it just transport bytes and delegate content 
> type handling to frameworks?

I think there is an appetite for a low-level standardized API. It will 
take time (but we have time at the moment) but I do think it should be 
possible to agree an API that everyone can support.

The key question for me is Async vs Loom+Blocking.

As has been pointed out, there are plenty of async APIs already. To some 
extent a common, low-level async API seems like something we should have 
been working on a couple of Servlet versions ago.

If we start from the assumption that Loom is the future (the first step 
may actually be to debate that assumption) then I wonder if we would not 
be better off thinking about a low level, Loom based, blocking API as 
the basis for a future split of the Servlet spec.

Mark