Trying to play nice with 1.0 proxies

Hello folks,

I'm working on a project that has a client and server communicating via
HTTP. An important part of this project is compatibility with proxies.
I've been digging through RFC's and various mailing lists, but I'm
having a little bit of trouble coming to solid conclusions around
persistent connections.

Ideally, my client and server want to use persistent connections, even
where 1.0 proxies get into the mix. My first reaction was to use 1.0
style connections, with the "Connection: keep-alive" header. However,
reading RFC 2068, it sounds like that's being discouraged.

Is the recommended approach never to use the "Connection:
keep-alive" header, but rather to rely on 1.0 proxies that have
persistent connection capabilities to default to persistent
connections (1.1 style)?

Would anyone care to comment on the current state of the net w.r.t. to
proxies? Are HTTP 1.0 proxies no more than a bad memory, or are they
still pretty commonplace?

Thanks for your input. :-)

Regards,

Neil Gower
--
Senior Software Architect 
iNAGO Corp. Canada

Received on Sunday, 24 June 2001 00:39:29 UTC