Re: Connections

At 18:25 09/12/1998 -0500, Jim_Ravan@avid.com wrote:
>When is a connection established? When is a connection dropped? How can I
>tell? My application has very definite ideas about when it wants to be
>connected to an HTTP server, and when it doesn't. In fact the API to my
>layer has "Establis Connection" and "Terminate Connection" entry points. I
>have looked at the libwww interfaces, but I can't figure out how to set up
>and tear down the HTTP connection.

There was recently a discussion of the various libwww time out mechanisms
but I can't find the link as I am off-line right now, but you should be
able to find it in the archives linked from

	http://www.w3.org/Library/

An HTTP application shouldn't have any ideas about the underlying transport
mechanism, it is only interested in issuing requests and getting responses.
This is why libwww has the abstraction of the underlying transport
connection (a HTChannel object). Therefore, if you application is an HTTP
application then you shouldn't worry about that.

Furthermore, a TCP connection runs between two parties of which both can
close the connection so one party is never in full control of the lifetime
of the connection.

Henrik
--
Henrik Frystyk Nielsen,
World Wide Web Consortium
http://www.w3.org/People/Frystyk

Received on Friday, 11 December 1998 10:45:22 UTC