Show HN: httpinvoke – js HTTP client - easy progress events, binary files, etc.

by tahu • 13 years ago

28 12 13 years ago

tahu6• 13 years ago

Existing libraries - like jquery, reqwest and superagent - had no easy support for promises, binary files and progress events, did not support a wide range of browser versions, did not nicely treat HTTP status codes. So I made this.

dreamdu5t• 13 years ago

How does this compare with superagent?

tahu6• 13 years ago

httpinvoke and superagent differences:

* superagent has a "fluent" API, httpinvoke is a plain function, with an options object and with Node.js callbacks and/or promises.

* superagent is not easy to use with binary uploads/downloads

* superagent does not give you an abstraction over progress events

* httpinvoke does not build query strings

* httpinvoke gives you raw multipart/form-data responses, does not parse them

Other aspects are comparable (file size, Node.js and browser support, etc).

antihero2• 13 years ago

What happens if you use this with a different promise library (e.g. bluebird)? I'm rather confused - if everything implements it's own promises, does it "just work" or do we have to worry about it all getting rather messy?

tahu6• 13 years ago

Hi, thanks for the questions, sorry for the late reply..

httpinvoke fully implements Promises/A+ specification. The spec is very short and easily implementable. The implementation in httpinvoke takes only 568bytes when minified (check it out!).

So the answer is, if you use httpinvoke with a different promise library, it will work, unless the library really is at odds with Promises/A+ specification. Which is unlikely, because all the major promises libraries support it, even if they do not indicate that in their documentation.

httpinvoke only contact with the external promise (which it can only get when onFulfill or onReject returns one) is the .then method here [1].

[1] https://github.com/jakutis/httpinvoke/blob/master/src/common...

antihero2• 13 years ago

Say, hypothetically (I haven't done any tests or anything) that Bluebird was faster than the included promise specification, is there some sort of dependency injection to replace it, seeing as it's a spec?

nevf• 13 years ago

Are there any plans to support gzip in GET the way http-get does?

tahu6• 13 years ago

Thank you! Just implemented gzip support and released 1.0.4.

Oleg2tor2• 13 years ago

Simple question - how to send "application/x-www-form-urlencoded" with inputs? Why documentation miss basic things like this?

tahu6• 13 years ago

Sorry about that. Now it's fixed. https://github.com/jakutis/httpinvoke#examples

Oleg2tor2• 13 years ago

Wow, so quick. Thank you. Awesome.

Show HN: httpinvoke – js HTTP client - easy progress events, binary files, etc.

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