What, Go's net/http is fantastic. I don't understand that take. Many servers are built on it because it's so fully featured out of the box.

The server side is great. Sending a http request is… not

Your java knowledge is outdated. Java's JDK has a nice, modern HTTP Client https://docs.oracle.com/en/java/javase/11/docs/api/java.net....

Ahh, java. You never change, even if you're modern

    HttpClient client = HttpClient.newBuilder()
        .version(Version.HTTP_1_1)
        .followRedirects(Redirect.NORMAL)
        .connectTimeout(Duration.ofSeconds(20))
        .proxy(ProxySelector.of(
           new InetSocketAddress("proxy.example.com", 80)
        ))
        .authenticator(Authenticator.getDefault())
        .build();

       HttpResponse<String> response = client.send(request, BodyHandlers.ofString());

       System.out.println(response.statusCode());
       System.out.println(response.body());

For the record, you're most likely not even interacting with that API directly if you're using any current framework, because most just provide automagically generated clients and you only define the interface with some annotations

What's the matter with this? It's a clean builder pattern, the response is returned directly from send. I've certainly seen uglier Java

Just my opinion of course, but:

> What's the matter with this?

To me what makes this very "Java" is the arguments being passed, and all the OOP stuff that isn't providing any benefit and isn't really modeling real-world-ish objects (which IMHO is where OOP shines). .version(Version.HTTP_1_1) and .followRedirects(Redirect.NORMAL) I can sort of accept, but it requires knowing what class and value to pass, which is lookups/documentation reference. These are spread out over a bunch of classes. But we start getting so "Java" with the next ones. .connectTimeout(Duration.ofSeconds(20)) (why can't I just pass 20 or 20_000 or something? Do we really need another class and method here?) .proxy(ProxySelector.of(new InetSocketAddress("proxy.example.com", 80))), geez that's complex. .authenticator(Authenticator.getDefault()), why not just pass bearer token or something? Now I have to look up this Authenticator class, initialize it, figure out where it's getting the credentials, how it's inserting them, how I put the credentials in the right place, etc. The important details are hidden/obscured behind needless abstraction layers IMHO.

I think Java is a good language, but most modern Java patterns can get ludicrous with the abstractions. When I was writing lots of Java, I was constantly setting up an ncat listener to hit so I could see what it's actually writing, and then have to hunt down where a certain thing is being done and figuring out the right way to get it to behave correctly. Contrast with a typical Typescript HTTP request and you can mostly tell just from reading the snippet what the actual HTTP request is going to look like.

> but it requires knowing what class and value to pass

Unless you use a text editor without any coding capabilities, your IDE should show you which values you can pass. The alternative is to have more methods, I guess?

> why can't I just pass 20 or 20_000 or something

20 what? Milliseconds? Seconds? Minutes? While I wouldn't write the full Duration.ofSeconds(20) (you can save the "Duration."), I don't understand how one could prefer a version that makes you guess the unit.

> proxy(ProxySelector.of(new InetSocketAddress("proxy.example.com", 80))), geez that's complex

Yes it is, can't add anything here. There's a tradeoff between "do the simple thing" and "make all things possible", and Java chooses the second here.

> .authenticator(Authenticator.getDefault()), why not just pass bearer token or something?

Because this Authenticator is meant for prompting a user interactively. I concur that this is very confusing, but if you want a Bearer token, just set the header.

Fair points.

> Unless you use a text editor without any coding capabilities, your IDE should show you which values you can pass. The alternative is to have more methods, I guess?

Fair enough, as much as I don't like it, in Java world it's safe to assume everyone is using an IDE. And when your language is (essentially) dependent on an IDE, this becomes a non-issue (actually I might argue it's even a nice feature since it's very type safe).

> 20 what? Milliseconds? Seconds? Minutes? While I wouldn't write the full Duration.ofSeconds(20) (you can save the "Duration."), I don't understand how one could prefer a version that makes you guess the unit.

I would assume milliseconds and would probably have it in the method name, like timeoutMs(...) or something. I will say it's very readable, but if I was writing it I'd find it annoying. But optimizing for readability is a reasonable decision, especially since 80% of coding is reading rather than writing (on average).

> why can't I just pass 20 or 20_000 or something? Do we really need another class and method here?

If you've ever dealt with time, you'll be grateful it's a duration and not some random int.

The boilerplate of not having sane defaults. .NET is much simpler:

    using HttpClient client = new();
    HttpResponseMessage response = await client.GetAsync("https://...");
    if (response.StatusCode is HttpStatusCode.OK)
    {
        string s = await response.Content.ReadAsStringAsync();
        // ...
    }

That's just an example. It does have defaults: https://docs.oracle.com/en/java/javase/11/docs/api/java.net.... (search for "If this method is not invoked")

Yeah, so much simpler,

"Common IHttpClientFactory usage issues"

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/extensions/htt...

"Guidelines for using HttpClient"

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/fundamentals/networ...

And this doesn't account for all gotchas as per .NET version, than only us old timers remember to cross check.

I didn't mention IHttpClientFactory - just HttpClient. I will concede that ASP manages to be confusing quite often. As for the latter, guidelines are not requirements anymore than "RTFM" is; You can use HttpClient without reading the guidelines and be just fine.

For various outcomes of fine, depending on .NET version, given that not everyone is on very latest.

Yeah this is all over Rust codebases too for good reason. The argument is that default params obfuscate behaviour and passing in a struct (in Rust) with defaults kneecaps your ability to validate parameters at compile time.

It does have defaults, the above example manually sets everything to show people reading the docs what that looks like.

> What's the matter with this? It's a clean builder pattern

I feel like you answered yourself. Java makes you do this by not supporting proper keyword arguments.

Your http client setup is over-complicated. You certainly don't need `.proxy` if you are not using a proxy or if you are using the system default proxy, nor do you need `.authenticator` if you are not doing HTTP authentication. Nor do you need `version` since there is already a fallback to HTTP/1.1.

  HttpClient client = HttpClient.newBuilder()
    .followRedirects(Redirect.NORMAL)
    .connectTimeout(Duration.ofSeconds(20))
    .build();

It was literally just copy pasted from the linked source (the official Oracle docs)

And those docs were likely trying to show you how to use multiple features, not the most basic implementation of it

I mean dont get me wrong, I work with Java basically 8 hours per day. I also get _why_ the API is as it is - It essentially boils down to the massive Inversion of Control fetish the Java ecosystem has.

It does enable code that "hides" implementation very well, like the quoted examples authentication API lets you authenticate in any way you can imagine, as in literally any way imaginable.

Its incredibly flexible. Want to only be able to send the request out after you've touched a file, send of a Message through a message broker and then maybe flex by waiting for the response of that async communication and use that as a custom attribute in the payload, additionally to a dynamically negotiated header to be set according to the response of a DNS query? yeah, we can do that! and the caller doesnt have to know any of that... at least as long as it works as intended

Same with the Proxy layer, the client is _entirely_ extensible, it is what Inversion of Control enables.

It just comes with the unfortunate side-effect of forcing the dev to be extremely fluent in enterprisey patterns. I dont mind it anymore, myself. the other day ive even implemented a custom "dependency injection" inspired system for data in a very dynamic application at my dayjob. I did that so the caller wont even need to know what data he needs! it just get automatically resolved through the abstraction. But i strongly suspect if a jr develeoper which hasnt gotten used to the java ecosystem will come across it, he'll be completely out of his depth how the grander system works - even though a dev thats used to it will likely understand the system within a couple of moments.

Like everything in software, everything has advantages and disadvantages. And Java has just historically always tried to "hide complexity", which in practice however paradoxically multiplies complexity _if youre not already used to the pattern used_.

Thanks for the thoughtful response, I appreciate it.

Yeah, I remember the first time I encountered a spring project (well before boot was out) and just about lost my shit with how much magic was happening.

It is productive once you know a whole lot about it though, and I already had to make that investment so might as well reap the rewards.

What's wrong with Go's? I've never had any issues with it. Go has some of the best http batteries included of any language

I guess he never used Fiber's APIs lol

The stdlib may not be the best, but the fact all HTTP libs that matter are compatible with net/http is great for DX and the ecosystem at large.

Thr comment I replied to was talking about sending a http requests. Go’s server side net/http is excellent, the client side is clunky verbose and suffers from many of the problems that Python’s urllib does.

Go's net/http Client is built for functionality and complete support of the protocol, including even such corner cases as support for trailer headers: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Reference/... Which for a lot of people reading this message is probably the first time they've heard of this.

It is not built for convenience. It has no methods for simply posting JSON, or marshaling a JSON response from a body automatically, no "fluent" interface, no automatic method for dealing with querystring parameters in a URL, no direct integration with any particular authentication/authorization scheme (other than Basic Authentication, which is part of the protocol). It only accepts streams for request bodys and only yields streams for response bodies, and while this is absolutely correct for a low-level library and any "request" library that mandates strings with no ability to stream in either direction is objectively wrong, it is a rather nice feature to have available when you know the request or response is going to be small. And so on and so on.

There's a lot of libraries you can grab that will fix this, if you care, everything from clones of the request library, to libraries designed explicitly to handle scraping cases, and so on. And that is in some sense also exactly why the net/http client is designed the way it is. It's designed to be in the standard library, where it can be indefinitely supported because it just reflects the protocol as directly as possible, and whatever whims of fate or fashion roll through the developer community as to the best way to make web requests may be now or in the future, those things can build on the solid foundation of net/http's Request and Response values.

Python is in fact a pretty good demonstration of the risks of trying to go too "high level" in such a client in the standard library.

>Honestly the thing that consistently surprises me is that requests hasn't been standardised and brought into the standard library

Instead, official documentation seems comfortable with recommending a third party package: https://docs.python.org/3/library/urllib.request.html#module...

>The Requests package is recommended for a higher-level HTTP client interface.

Which was fine when requests were the de-facto-standard only player in town, but at some point modern problems (async, http2) required modern solutions (httpx) and thus ecosystem fragmentation began.

Well, the reason for all the fragmentation is because the Python stdlib doesn't have the core building blocks for an async http or http2 client in the way requests could build on urllib.

The h11, h2, httpcore stack is probably the closest thing to what the Python stdlib should look like to end the fragmentation but it would be a huge undertaking for the core devs.

> but it would be a huge undertaking for the core devs.

More importantly, it would be massively breaking to remove the existing functionality (and everyone would ignore a deprecation), and confusing not to (much like it was when 2.x had both "urllib" and "urllib2").

It'd be nice to have something high level in the standard library based on urllib primitives. Offering competition to those, not so much.

Node now supports the Fetch API.

> dotnet's HttpClient is... fine.

Yes, and it's in the standard library (System namespace). Being Microsoft they've if anything over-featured it.

It's fine but it's sharp-edged, in that it's recommended to use IHttpClientFactory to avoid the dual problem of socket exhaustion ( if creating/destroying lots of HttpClients ) versus DNS caching outliving DNS ( if using a very long-lived singleton HttpClient ).

And while this article [1] says "It's been around for a while", it was only added in .NET Framework 4.5, which shows it took a while for the API to stabilise. There were other ways to make web requests before that of course, and also part of the standard library, and it's never been "difficult" to do so, but there is a history prior to HttpClient of changing ways to do requests.

For modern dotnet however it's all pretty much a solved problem, and there's only ever been HttpClient and a fairly consistent story of how to use it.

[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/extensions/htt...

>"It's been around for a while"

is 14 years not a while?

It is, but it's also a decade after the language was first released.

Python’s urllib2 (now urllib.request) started out in the year 2000 [0].

.NET’s WebRequest was available in .NET Framework 1.1 in 2003 [1].

But since then, Microsoft noticed the issues with WebRequest and came up with HttpClient in 2012. It has some issues and footguns, like those related to HttpClient lifetime, but it’s a solid library. On the other hand, the requests library for Python started in 2011 [2], but the stdlib library hasn’t seen many improvements.

[0] https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/6d7e47b8ea1b8cf82927d...

[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.net.webr...

[2] https://github.com/psf/requests/blob/main/HISTORY.md#001-201...

requests is some janky layer onto of other janky layers. last thing you want in the stdlib.

it's called the STD lib for a reason...