We now resume our regularly scheduled programming

1, 2, 1, 2 - is this thing on?

OK, it's about time I updated this blog. For a couple of weeks after the midterm checkpoint, some external events interfered significantly with my progress. But am now back to forging ahead, so to speak. I'll be adding one week to my schedule to compensate for the time lost - my original schedule went to the "suggested pencils down" date of August 10th, but I'll keep going full time until August 17th, the "firm" pencils down date. My main goal will be to get MojoX::UserAgent to a usable state. I would like it to be fully asynchronous (using the LWPng model as inspiration), with support for persistent connections, automatically following redirections, basic (ie session) cookies and (hopefully) opportunistic request pipelining.

I've already created the source repository, and in the last week have gotten to a point where it makes simple requests, invokes an asynchronous callback upon completion and automatically follows redirects. I have basic, in-memory cookie storage implemented, and am now working on per-request cookie retrieval. And I have discovered the "wondeful" world of cookie "standards" - or lack thereof. Multiple specifications, ambiguities and de-facto standard behavior established by dominant user-agents and even by quirks of major banking sites (example 1, example 2 (note that these read almost like entertaining short stories, at least for me (YMMV))). It even looks like the IETF's http-state working group is being resurected. Ah well, here I go...