Week 4: About last week

I was hoping to be able to update my blog this weekend, but alas, life had other plans... Anyway, last week my main achievement was to teach the client side of Mojo about (pipelined) HEAD requests. The changes required were fairly significant. This is explained by the fact that in the Mojo architecture, pipelined requests are handled by a Pipeline object; in turn a Pipeline has a bunch of Transactions, each transaction has a Request and a Response, which are in turn Messages, which use Content filters. And all of these objects are Stateful. Changes had to trickle all the way down, and so I also had to make sure I undertood things all the way down. I could see three ways to implement my change, and after choosing one, implementing it and sending a pull request, I was pretty happy that Sebastian agreed that the method I picked made the most sense. Integrating into an open source project is not just about writing code, it is also about understanding the sense of design of the main architect(s) - at least if you're interested in getting your changes merged into the mainline project. Perl philosophy may have TIMTOWTDI at its heart, but some ways to do it are more equal than others, and software developpers tend to be opinionated...

Now I'm thinking more and more about MojoX::UserAgent. But one thing I am worried about is that I am diverging somewhat from my intial GSoC plan. Not in the overall direction and the goal to write a UserAgent, but in some of the intermediate deliverables. This is something I will need to discuss with my mentor to see how it should be handled...