I started experimenting with SOAPpy yesterday and immediately hit a
snag. Both web services I tried simply hung and never replied. After a
lot of digging, I found out what was going wrong: urllib.urlopen() is
issuing an HTTP/1.0 request, but Microsoft IIS 5 ignores the client HTTP
version and replies with an HTTP/1.1 response.
This is a problem because while HTTP/1.0 servers are expected to close
the connection once the response is finished, HTTP/1.1 servers are
allowed keep the connection open. urllib assumes that the connection
always closes. Therefore, when urllib receives an HTTP/1.1 response, it
hangs until the server feels inclined to close the connection.
Obviously the server is wrong, since HTTP/1.0 requests should only
receive HTTP/1.0 responses, but I can't do anything about that.
Now, there is actually code in httplib that would allow urllib to
correctly understand HTTP/1.1 responses, if only urllib used it. After
the headers have been parsed, urllib calls getfile(), but I think it
should call getresponse() instead. The result of getresponse() is
almost like a file; it just needs readline(s) and iteration. In fact,
perhaps httplib's getfile() should be deprecated, since HTTP/1.1 has
several options for encoding the response body (chunking and
compression) and users of httplib shouldn't have to know about those
encodings. Users should use getresponse() instead.
So, is it worth my time to fix urllib and httplib, making urllib use
getresponse() instead of getfile()? Would the changes be accepted? Is
anyone else working on something similar?
BTW, this is on Python 2.3.5, but I haven't spotted any changes between
Python 2.3.5 and current CVS that would have fixed the problem. I'll
start trying Python CVS in a moment.
Shane
